ISBN 953-219-142-9

9 789532 191424

adami

Nikola Petkovi A CENTRAL EUROPE OF OUR OWN Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Postcomunism and the Absence of Authenticity

Editor Milan Zagorac Review articles dr. sc. Stipe Grgas dr. Katherine M. Arens

Publisher Adami, d.o.o. Zvonimirova 20 a, Rijeka, Croatia tel.: 00 385 51 650 145 fax.: 00 385 51 650 144 www.adamic.hr For the publisher Franjo Butorac Photo Ranko Dokmanovi

THE CROATIAN MINISTRY OF CULTURE and THE CITY OF RIJEKA DEPARTMENT OF CULTURE provided a financial support of this book.

Edition 750 copies Print BMG Ltd., Zagreb

CIP Katalogizacija u publikaciji Sveuilina knjinica RIJEKA UDK 327(4191.2) PETKOVI, Nikola A Central Europe of our own: postmodernism, postcolonialism, postcomunism and the absence of authenticity / Nikola Petkovi. Rijeka : Adami, 2003. Istodobno izalo na hrv. jeziku. Bibliografija. ISBN 953-219-142-0 101102048

Printing completed in September 2003

PRINTED IN CROATIA September 2003

Nikola Petkovi

A CENTRAL EUROPE OF OUR OWN

Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Postcomunism and the Absence of Authenticity

adami
Rijeka, 2003.

Acknowledgments

It would be impossible to name all the colleagues and friends without whom this book would never be written the way it is. I will start with my close friend Connie Newton without whom it would not be written at all. None of the words that keep coming to my mind seem to contain enough meaning to encompass my gratitude for her unconditional friendship and support. I would also like to single out Katherine Arens, my mentor, professor, and dear friend who had patience to work with me all these years, following the development of my English and my ideas about the topic with so much needed understanding. Also, I would like to thank my professors for their suggestions and advice, especially the late Andr Lefevere, who was not able to see the final version. Velimir Viskovi had a personal and professional courage to employ me as an editor of the Encyclopedia Krlezijana back in 1987. and introduced me to the writings of Miroslav Krlea. Milorad Stojevi remains the exemplary colleague and close devoted friend without whom many aspect of Croatian literature would still be unknown to me. Nenad Smokrovi and Nenad Mievi witnessed my first scholarly works and gave me the necessary encouragement that kept me devoted to literature for over two decades. Also, I must acknowledge all my professors from The University of Zagreb who broadened my horizons and encouraged me to continue my education abroad. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their patience and support, especially my grandfather Nikola Luzer, who, among beutiful things that surpass the language, brought home a copy of The Good Soldier Svejk when I was five. Above all I must express my gratitude to Jacqueline Loss, for all the pages she read, and articles she corrected over two years, as well as for all the suggestions that improved this manuscript. All the errors that remain are my own.

I would like to thank The Graduate Research Office at The University of Texas at Austin for a Continuing Fellowship that enabled the essential part of this research. I am especially, grateful to The Soros Foundation office in Prague, The Research Support Scheme, for a Grant in 1995-96 that enabled me to complete my project. This book received a financial support from The Croatian Ministry of Culture as well as the City of Rijeka Department of Culture.

Contents
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Authors Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 7

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Locating the post in postmodern and postcolonial . . . . . . . 13 Chapter 1: The Worlds of Central Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Two faces of utopia:a paradigm for Central Europe . . . . . . . 21 History comes to you: Kafka, Svejk and the Butchers wife . . . 34 Performing Central Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Josef Svejk and the Loss of Historical Narratives . . . . . . 48 From Svejk to the post Soviet successor states . . . . . . . . . . 56 Kunderas Anabasis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 A Central Europe of our own . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Central Europe between post and past . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 An Interim Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Chapter 2: Six Characters In Search of the Danube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Defining the River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 The Poetics of a Classical Exemplar . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 The importance of a Journey I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Travelers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 The importance of a Journey II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 The River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

The invisible Danube: the question of Source Professor Claudio Magris . . . . . . . AmedeoA Secret Historiographer of Misguidance . . . . . . . . . . . . Claudio the Pilgrim . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . 113 . . . . . . . . . . 113 . . . . . . . . . . 118 . . . . . . . . . . 122

Outflow: a provisional conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Chapter 3: The Poet(h)ics of the Danube:Rethinking Identities . . . . . . . 141

From Herr Kyselak to gospon Krleza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Inscribing desire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 The Lost Letters of Herr Kyselak . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 Voices from the outsikrts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Miroslav Krlea: Identity as a Servile Embodiment of Worthlessness . . . . . . . . . 155 Chapter 4: Miroslav Krleas Colonial Motifs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 The Croatian God Mars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 Multiple voices I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Trdak Vids Long March through the Institutions . . . . 199 Multiple voices II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 A Supply Sergeant in the Barrel: The Displaced Anger of Loborec tef . . . . . . . . . . . 205 It a world seen from beyond and above . . . . . . . . . . . 212 A colonial perspective from below . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Krlea as Central European Other . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Romantic patriots and decenterd matriots . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Beyond the Nation State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

Authors Note

This project attempts to offer a new theoretical paradigm, one that will allow a re-conceptualization of the literary and cultural histories of the countries of Central Europethat vaguely defined geopolitical entity, which lies between the traditional hearts of Eastern and Western Europe. Traditionally, Central Europe has been associated most closely with the successor states to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (disassembled at the end of the First World War), but now the term is re-emerging in reference to the successor states of the Eastern Block located outside of the Russian-language sphere. To define and explore such a theoretical construct, however, requires a set of tests against historical data. For that reason, even before I embark on a more detailed expositions in the chapters which follow, it is important to outline here precisely what kinds of conclusions should and should not be expected of this discussion regarding Central European literatures and cultures. First and foremost, the Central Europe under discussion is a region of aggregates. It has neither precise geographic outlines nor a single dominant cultural tradition to which it belongs. Instead, Central Europe has always had the status of one of Benedict Andersons imagined communities, since it has been assumed to exist by both its inhabitants and by outsiders. This assumption has been made on various grounds, each of which play a role in defining its existence.
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Perhaps the best way to define Central Europe is as a cross-cultural space. It is a region in which the traditions of many ethnic groups meet and blend, producing a culture with a very distinctive everyday life for the middle classes while creating a set of expectations for less dominant groups that could not possibly be met. The cultural life of Austro-Hungary, for example, had several centers at the turn of the century, most notably, Budapest and Vienna, but also including Trieste, Prague, and other smaller cities where various religions and languages crossed paths and adjusted their expectations to each other and to the absent central (and largely German-language) culture of the Habsburg nation. Central European culture and literature that I will be discussing must include literatures written in several languages -- namely, Croatian, Italian, German, and Czech. Yet in including examples of these literatures, I will be writing against the grain of the national traditions in which they usually have been framed. Franz Kafka, for example, has a prominent position within the German-language literary canon as a modernist writer; when he is considered as a Central European, one discovers that the kind of existential crisis in which his characters find themselves are echoed in literatures other than German. Jaroslav Haseks Good Soldier Svejk, for example, has an equally surreal journey to the war front by train as that undertaken by the land surveyor K. in Kafkas The Castle. Both are at the mercy of an unknown and unknowable central authority that has their names inscribed in its record books, but which does not acknowledge their individuality behind their shared existence as recipients of the Austro-Hungarian justice and governance. Both characters are also from the margins of their cultures: K. as a German-speaker in a city that is rejecting German heritage and Svejk as a member of a Slavic nation that has little political power of its own. In many ways, then, the examples cited will shy away from the point of view of specialists in the various national literatures involved. Instead, my treatment of the narratives in question will re-create the trans-national and cross-cultural space in which traditionally recognized works of various national literatures have been produced.
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The introduction is typical of my approach to national traditions. It draws on statements by the modern masters of Slavic and Russian literature today, including Milan Kundera, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Joseph Brodsky; however, I will do violence to their positions within their various national traditions as well as to their individual aesthetic programs. I treat critics themselves in an event which documents the continued existence of Central Europe. Conveniently, such an event really happened at a 1990 conference at Lisbon where a discussion was held about the relationship between political and cultural traditions in an era of massive political trauma. The overriding uncertainty about what remains after the purported dissolution of the Soviet block allowed a free discussion about cultural boundaries to emerge: the critics and writers were arguing other issuesif all Slavic culture is Russian culture, if Russian culture is eastern or western, and if other Slavic cultures are actually more like Russian culture or influenced by other cultural spheres. In the rest of the introduction, then, I treat these authors as part of an event in which the existence and cultural-political implications of a Central European cultural space emerged clearly. To their voices from the Soviet successor states, I add that of Egon Schwarz, an migr intellectual from that vanished Austro-Hungarian Central Europe who, unlike the writers at Lisbon, has convinced himself that Central Europe had always been a utopia. By playing off these points of view, I argue for the validity of the key assumptions underlying my project: that Central European culture exists as a constant behind the political changes characterizing the region over the past century and a half, that this Central European culture is not exhausted by the influences of any one ethnic group or national culture, and that this culture has a certain very distinct set of implications for the identities of its authors, intellectuals, and inhabitants. In discussing this panoply of voices, I argue that Central European culture continues to impose itself as an imagined community on the identities and lives of its intellectuals and authors, even when it has no official existence in geopolitics. Considered politically, the region is thus always postcolonial: some external pow9

er has always exerted dominance over it. Yet at the same time, the region has, for the last century and a half, never lost an alternate (if relatively undefined) source of identity as the land in between, the culture of meetings, of blendings, and cultural renegotiations. The chapters that follow expand on this theoretical paradigm for the cultural existence of Central Europe as postcolonial, yet distinctive, by presenting the work of two Central European authors. These works make the case for the persistence of Central European culture as a culture of resistance to external dominationa postmodern culture as defined by Lyotardone that resists the imposition of external master narratives by showing where those narratives cease to make sense in those everyday lives far from the power centers of the empire (such as Kafkas K. who can never find out who wrote the orders he thought he was following). As we shall see, these narratives share the sense of a displaced geopolitics and uncertain personal identity politics as they tell the stories of Central European characters. They are thus postmodern (even if almost a century old) because they concentrate on protean identity as a function of competing traditions rather than on the crisis of personal identity that characterizes the literature of modernism. The specific, nonlinear treatment of time employed in this study deserves special note before I enter into the main body of my discussion: its chronological organization is reversed. I am comparing authors of the 1980s and the 1990s, drawn from the West (Italy) and the East (the Lisbon Conference authors) and the Center (Schwarz, Kundera), with authors as far back as the turn of the century also from the West (Musil), the Center (Hasek and Kafka), and the East (Russian modernists). This is intentional: just as each author is not placed within an independent national/ethnic/linguistic tradition, neither are the historical conventions of dividing epochs from the turn of the century until today followed. In fact, I believe that the geopolitics of Central Europe run counter to its cultural history. Because of its unusual colonial cultural-historical situation, Central Europe has been a postmodern culture for at least a century. Such culture may never have absorbed the high modernism that characterized the literatures of the Western colonial powers, but in10

stead constituted itself as a cultural space that is somewhat paradoxically Western, but in opposition to the dominant western norms. That is, since it has always been colonized, and hence not able to exert its own cultural authority except within its own unwritten spaces, and since it has nonetheless always been Western (and hence fully able to understand various Western tradition as insiders, as well as colonized aliens) Central Europe tells its story in postmodern terms. Some of the narratives analyzed in this study demonstrate that the region has done so in prose for at least the last century. The theoretical paradigm offered thus moves toward a new modes of how literary history can be done, moving beyond simple dichotomies (East-West, colonized-colonizer) into a more flexible image of how dominant and non-dominant cultures have blended at the margins of Europe for the last century, not only at the brief fin de sicle but also now as the power blocks realign.

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Introduction

Locating the post in postmodern and postcolonial

Before he embarked on an analytical journey to locate the constitutive and operative elements of postmodernity and postmodernism as they characterize the aesthetics of his world, Kwame Anthony Appiah decided to play with the already-existing commonplaces of that overly-discussed condition. In order to illustrate Jean-Franois Lyotards remark that postmodernity is a metanarrative about the end of metanarratives,1 and aware that he is already operating within a clich, Appiah offers his own account of post, implying that narratives still resist the shark-infested waters around the semantic island of the postmodern (Appiah 140). Although the tradition of borrowing from other narratives is neither historically nor qualitatively the exclusive property of postmodernism, my own search for operative dimensions of such overly discussed topics (postmodernity, postmodernism, colonialism and postcolonialism) for Central European cultural, ethnopolitical, geographical and literary strata will try to remain faithful not only to those issues, but also to the provisory cognitive and narrative methods of the postmodern context. In other words, in the study which follows, I am going to revisit a seemingly overused and overdetermined region of literary and cultural theory usually referred to as postmodernism and postcolonialism in order to reclaim and resituate these theories as they apply to under-studied geocultural space of
13

Central Europe that presently lies between the postcolonial Western and Eastern powers and has been repeatedly colonized. To evoke the descriptive and diagnostic power of a narrative as the possible introduction to the topic of postmodernity and postcolonialism in Central Europe, I will invoke a story already recycled by Appiah, a story about his friend, the late Margaret Masterman. In the midsixties, she was invited to a symposium on Thomas Kuhn and, with other authorities, asked to participate in a discussion on Kuhns work. Appiah remembers: Unfortunately for Margaret, she developed infective hepatitis in the period leading up to the symposium and she was unable, as a result, to prepare a paper. Fortunately for all of us, she was able to sit in her hospital bed -- in block 8, Norwich hospital, to whose staff the paper she finally did write is dedicated -- and create a subject index to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In the course of working through the book with index cards, Margaret identified no less than twenty-one senses, possibly more, not less in which Kuhn uses the word paradigm. After her catalog of these twenty-one uses, she remarks laconically that not all senses of paradigm are inconsistent with one another: and she continues: Nevertheless, given the adversity, it is obviously reasonable to ask: Is there anything in common between all these senses? Is there, philosophically speaking, anything definite or general about the notion of a paradigm which Kuhn is trying to make clear? Or is he just a historian-poet describing different happenings which have occurred in the history of science, and referring to them all by using the same word paradigm? (Margaret Masterman, The Nature of a Paradigm, 59 n. 1;61,65. qtd. in Appiah 140) Appiah compares Mastermans semantic chase to identify meanings of the word paradigm to Lyotards, Jamesons and Habermas search for postmodernity and postmodernism, and calls
14

it a work for a minute before breakfast (140). Invoking Margaret Masterman and comparing it with his own research in locating the connections between the postmodern and postcolonial, Appiah also treats postmodernism as it were as simple or as complex as the person who searches for its meaning. To speak of postmodernity and the postmodern today, at the end of the millennia, sounds just as exhausted as the exhausted literature discussed in John Barths celebrated 1967 essay.2 Barth balances between modernity and its historical consequences, arguing that the apparent exhaustion of all literary forms requires the contemporary writer to confront an intellectual dead end and employ it against himself to accomplish new human work (Barth 7). He in 1967, like Appiah in 1992, senses the dual dynamics of a paradigm shift, when a historical shift requires the redefinition of both an intellectual program and the means of accomplishing it. Both authors sense that, if they wish to retain that productivity along with their culturally distinctive interpretative powers, they simultaneously have to move forward while confronting the complexity of any newly emerging aesthetic and/or scientific reality. Historical paradigm shifts thus require new projects and even a new kind of subjectivity on behalf of the intellectuals involved. Already complicated and complex enough, Margaret Mastermans forest of paradigms appears simple and linear compared to literary theorys present hunt for the meaning of the word postmodernism. The comparative simplicity of her task is due to her cataloging the shifts of a scientific paradigm. She took a part in a process which, unlike the search for postmodernism, does not require a geocultural or geopolitical context for the varieties of the paradigm to be reenacted. While unwilling to further complicate the subject and sharing the same atmosphere of productive ambivalence and uncertainty that occurs, I cannot escape the feeling that both Mastermans and Appiahs searches are fairly manageable in comparison with the project intended in this study: the tracing of three parallel terms-postmodern(ism), postcolonialism, and Central Europe -- as they are descriptive of a particular geocultural reality, both in light of the political shifts that started with the disappearance of The Berlin Wall
15

and in their own unique historical tradition. The dimensions of my quest to articulate what the paradigm of Central Europe can mean to culture and history become especially acute in the light of the theoretical question guiding this work is: Does the post in postmodern equal the post in postcolonial? In other words, how does the anti-essentialist thrust of postmodern theory answer to fundamental notions of identity that are encountered in postcolonial political situations? Or asked another way: can a literary and cultural theory that announces an end to one kind of history be used to clarify the cultural dilemmas of individual subjects caught in the political changes characterizing a period of decolonization? Also, can a theory that has traditionally been used to confront Europe with other parts of the globe have application to cultures and models for subjectivity available in the Western part of the Old Continent as they interfere with non-dominant Western identities of Central Europe? In postmodern thought, ones identity is defined not out of ones own essence, but in relation to others. But what happens if those others are defined by an extremely fluid political and geographical situation, such as that which is historically found in Central Europe? What happens if those others do not themselves have any consistent reference point against which to define themselves, or if the underlying historical and cultural narratives against which they define their own identities are so unstable as to make them almost useless in defining personal subjectivity? In its practical dimensions, this project confronts these difficulties by analyzing examples from the literature of Central Europe as it addresses precisely these intertwined issues. This literature is itself from a landscape shifting and fictional, a literature whose cultural and historical fictionality is a result of its un-univocal political and intellectual identities. Its fictional identity nonetheless exerts influence on the identity constructions of its inhabitants, thereby creating a reality for individuals who live in this essentially fictional space. Moreover, this fictional space also produces a different cultural reality characterized by different artistic and intellectual programs than those
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found in the more stable geopolitical regions with their own immanent historical continuity. To avoid the almost circular theoretical discussions about distinctive elements of postmodernity characterizing current theories, this work will abstain from discussing the aesthetic of textuality, or of the eclipse... or the death of the subject, or the culture of the simulacrum, or the society of the spectacle3 (141). Instead, it will examine yet another, operatively potent segment of the ongoing debate, exploring postmodernity as a practical paradigm shift about the social functionality of culture itself,4 a shift that is closely tied to the historical ground on which Central European cultures are based. In clarifying this particular use of postmodernism, I will employ a variety of approaches to this epoch of axiological decline, especially to the absence of grand narratives of legitimations in a post-colonial era (Lyotard) and to post-individualist notions about an author as a potential disturbanceas a late modification of the modernist bourgeois-democrat intellectual whose deeds in high modernism were meant to discomfort the audience and eventually to correct their contingencies of truth. The paradigm shift between modernism and postmodernism in which grand narratives whose legitimacy was transcendent in relation to narrated objects were replaced by non-logocentric and truth-producing, locally-grounded narratives will be exemplified in Claudio Magris novel Danubio (Danube ). Speaking from within the margins of the former geopolitical totality of Mittereuropa, this novel calls the majority of geopolitical and cultural narratives regarding Central Europe into question. Magris explicitly demonstrates to the readers that historically speaking, the Danubian basin is itself in a postmodern condition, and that the kinds of geopolitical narratives conventionally used to describe its politics, history, and culture are inadequate tools for redrawing the map. A second facet of Central Europes contemporary postmodern and postcolonial condition will be represented in the form of the intellectual as a potential disturbance resisting externally imposed contingencies of truththe Croatian author Miroslav Krlea. Reacting to mainstream Central European culture, he uses his geopoliti17

cal and cultural displacement to interrogate the authority of the narrator and narrated subject within the culturally colonized reality of Southern Central Europe. Where Magris explores the narratives of postmodern and postcolonial Europe as they relate to the Danubian basin, Krlea offers an analysis of the regions subjects in their different colonial condition. By combining these views from two different kinds of margins, the paradigm of colonial as well as postcolonial Central Europe offered here suggests a historical postmodern condition of a distinct type for the region. The novel Danubio is placed at the juncture between the modernist tradition and the postmodern ambiance of its own symbolic order; although it belongs to contemporary Italian literature and, as such represents an item of a universally acknowledged literary tradition; in this particular Central European context, Danubio actually comes from a marginal middle European landscape. In spite of its geo-cultural marginality in relation to German-dominated Central Europe Danubio represents the mainstream of Central European narratives through its connections to canonical traditions. Its mainstream qualities are connected to the novels commitment to follow the interactions between Italy and other successor states of the Habsburg (and Russian empires). Danubio convincingly demonstrates how various historical narratives have failed to represent the reality of the region. Magris uses the river as the organizing principle of his narrative, one which expresses both the flux and the continuity among various geopolitical constructions of Central European identity. Against the background of the historiography of Central Europe (the political constructs used to discuss the region), the discursive space of the novel outlines some of the most pronounced tensions in the broader body of Central European literature. Following Magris narrative strategies allows one to view the possible realities offered by various geopolitical and literary constructs of Central Europe and to present Magris unique formulations of the regional inhabitants narrative strategies as a result of this geopolitical fiction and its attendant intellectual dynamics. From a more minor strand of Central European literature (in Deleuzes sense of a minor literature), chapters three and four
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present a dissenting viewthe perspective of Miroslav Krlea, a hegemonic figure within Croatian literature. His case is intriguing since he represents the power center of a literature that was, practically speaking, at the geographical outskirts of Central Europe. Compared to the permanent outsider status of more marginalized figures in Croatian literature, Krlea was a true representative of Deleuze and Guattaris concept of a minor writer. He parallels Kafkas position in German literature. His narratives offer a diagnostic of an artistic and intellectual identity constructed within the geographic margin outlined by Magris. The concluding chapter offers a return to the theoretical questions of the relation of postmodernism in Central European literature to postcolonial models of geopolitical identitiesit suggests a theoretical scheme for explaining the prevalence of postmodern narrative strategies among postcolonial writers. Using the contemporary culturo-logical achievements of displaced authors such as Czeslav Milosz, Milan Kundera, George Konrad and Ivo Banac, the conclusion briefly resituates the more canonical representatives of Central European tradition -- Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, and Jaroslav Hasek -- within the broader scope of Central European Literature from the perspective of postcolonial criticism and the theories of postmodern narrative. This conclusion offers the clear thesis that the cultural space of Central Europe has been permanently colonized by others, and that, in consequence, its literature has offered a distinctly anti-essentialist, colonial and (later, after the 1990 non-revolutions) postcolonial perspective on subjectivity and truth in fictional representations since the turn of the century. I suggest that the Central European literature of the twentieth century is inherently postmodern and, as such, in conflict with the modernism prevalent in the narratives of the imperial powers at the first half of the twentieth century. The significance of this study is two-fold. First, it offers a discussion of the links of post-colonialism and postmodernism in a European context, where it has not been used before. It divorces the question of a Western colonial tradition from the assumption of a dominant political hegemony whose imperial dynamics (in the di19

mensions familiar to the readers of the existing postcolonial criticism) have been directed out of Europe . Moreover, it introduces and validates theories of post-colonial discourse as a tool for interpreting writings from Central Europe. Although the mechanisms used to colonize Central European peoples from the times of the Romans to date cannot be compared with the mainstream views on colonialism offered by scholars of British and French literatures, the social, cultural, ideological and economical effects of cultural colonization in Central Europe are strikingly similar to those of India, Africa, and Latin America. The same can be said for their literatures. This study thus promotes an analysis in postmodern world literature from the marginal Central European perspective, suggesting a temporal rather than a geopolitical template for the future study of the global postcolonial condition.

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Chapter 1: The Worlds of Central Europe

Two faces of utopia: a paradigm for Central Europe

There is a clear connection between Mastermans index-card search for the various meanings of Kuhns word paradigm and the ongoing debate about the notion, definition, nature and location of Central Europe. An essay by Egon Schwartz, delivered in the spring of 1985 in Linz as a lecture organized by the PEN Club of Upper Austria.5 exemplifies that sense of a productive intellectual loss that drove Masterman to find difference under sameness. Schwarz 6 acknowledges the semantic, geographical, cultural, political and ethnopolitical confusion that follows each and every thought concerning Central Europe and demonstrates his very deep and analytical knowledge of the regions history. But in spite of his superb handling of regional historical and cultural problematics, after outlining various of perspectives regarding Central Europe, he concludes: When I look at what I have read and experienced, when I compare these controversial and largely incompatible concepts, I come to the inevitable conclusion that all efforts which might have led to the creation of a Central European community have either long stopped or are being
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phased out. Long before the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved officially in 1806, it had ceased to exist in reality. The last witnesses to the Habsburg Monarchy in which, in spite of all its faults, a coexistence of several nations and ethnic groups might have been possible, are dying. The emancipated Jewry, with its tolerance, its cosmopolitanism, and its cultural openness, has disappeared. Even basically negative influences such as German imperialism, which saw Central Europe as a territory in which to execute its power, no longer exist. And even the advancing Soviet Union has not been able to effect a coming together of European nations. In these circumstances Central Europe can be seen today only as a cultural concept... Most of those who use the term today know that these possibilities have disappeared and that they must restrict the meaning to the sphere of cultural, artistic effort and emotional content. This is accompanied by at most a few historical memories and strong uneasiness in view of the increasingly hysterical confrontations between the ideological powers, which threaten to crush everything in their path and under whose rule we find ourselves searching for spiritual freedom, an identity of our own, and a more peaceful and less deceptive self-conscience... For all these reasons I feel that we should make the best of the situation. Since there is no definable Central Europe, we are free to postulate a utopian one. It is permissible to call the quest for such a vague entity as Central Europe -- an entity which contradicts the historical givens -- a utopian project, because the search for Central Europe stems from the same suffering under the historical conditions as a utopia. Like any utopia, it also attempts to free the people from their inevitable political encumbrances by transporting them to another dimension. (In Search of Central Europe 153-54)
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This rather long quotation is typical of many analyses of Central Europe as it looks backwards to a vanished utopia, rather than alluding to forward progress. Although Schwarz admits that such a utopia should not be understood as esoteric or ineffective, (because whenever a group of people is formed in the name and spirit of utopia, it gains ipso facto the power of existence [154]), it is difficult to escape the impression that he unnecessarily poeticizes the topic or removes its immediacy to a past time, or to a timeless category (utopia) in order to enter safer waters of essayistic impressionism and thus avoids current cultural politics. Rational in an analysis that encompasses the historical events between the Holy Roman Empire and Mikhail Gorbachev, the author concludes in an emotionally generous manner. In order to replace his historiographical analysis with his authorial voice, Schwarz elevates his feelings about the problem to the level of rationality, making it the legal narrative for the region. Since the essay was delivered as a speech in 1985, it would not be fair to base a critique simply on the authors belief that the realities of Central Europe belong to history, either because their constitutive elements (the Holly Roman Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, Hitlers and Stalins conquests) or their witnesses (the contemporaries of the Habsburgs, the Jewry) have disappeared. Still, it is hardly convincing that an author capable of this kind of precise historical and political analysis, only five years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, could not have anchored his optimistic belief in a utopias inherent power to call things into existence in a more realistic context. He seems, in 1985, to be looking backwards by choice, not because there was no post-Soviet future on the horizon. The fact that after 1990 Central Europe re-gained its more active position on the global map, speaks in favor of the potential realism of such utopias; its reemergence reveals that the troubled region never actually ceased to exist in the way that Schwarz suggests. In a protean sense, the region may have entered and reentered into different mimicry games, as it was reconfigured in geopolitical shifts; however, it would be very hard to prove that Central Europe had ever actually vanished from the world, completely defeated by any of its numerous intruders, all of whom governed with the same
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ideathat they were more central to history than those they encountered on their imperialistic journeys east from Germany and France or west from Turkey and Russia. The sense of the regions hierarchy of values and respect toward tradition that characterizes Schwarzs essay is also still present among Central Europeans.7 In order to echo this climate and to demonstrate the ambiguity that surrounds all such discursive treatments of Central Europe, the text selected for analysis is not written by a poet, or a historian, but by an intellectual who, by virtue of his non-commitment to a specific aesthetic program, is supposedly freed from all the connotations that a vocational tie might produce. Although in a possession of such a freedom, Schwarz still reflects the region historically in a restrained manner; he does not attempt to redefine it. Different conclusions might be reached by poets such as Czeslav Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Milan Kundera and George Konrad who frequently speak of Central Europe. Their personal contributions are also analyzed in this project. Nonetheless, Schwarzs essay written in a hybrid genre as a poeticized historiography uncovers a disoriented semantics similar to that uncovered by Margaret Masterman. The tone of both essays provokes a similar reaction, one that may be summarized in two questions: (1)given this semantic instability of definitions, what is actually the topic of the discussion, and (2) who is speaking about these problematics? Like the confused semantic web employed in Kuhns writings on paradigms, Schwarzs What Central Europe Is and What It Is Not, poses the predominant question about the definitiveness or generalizability of any notion of Central Europe. After following Schwarzs shifts in definition: from a pedantic taxonomy to a prophetic visions of utopias, it is legitimate to draw on Masterman/Appiahs question in order to reframe our own: is Egon Schwarz perhaps just a historian-poet describing a random set of different happenings in history and referring to them using the same word Central Europe without really making historical redefinitions? It would be premature to decide either for or against this comparison, but the fact that Central Europe is being discussed from a variety of perspectives, and that there is so far no clear cultural or geopolitical
24

consensus determining what Central Europe is, underscores the confusion that surrounds the vague conceptual and historical borders of the borderlands in question. Schwarzs problem is thus by no means his alone. From the general perspectives of the Western and Eastern Europe, Central Europe either does not exist, or it is some odd mixture of marginal countries squeezed in between East and West, vegetating on the outskirts or at the crossroads of civilizations and cultures that see themselves obligated to dominate. The cultures who dominate self-impose their imagined historical obligations to involve parts of Central Europe in relationships with themselves, ignoring the regions claims to an individual identity. In their colonial search for an object of conquest, the colonizers feel obliged to serve history and to make this same history obligatory for the colonized.8 Many more renowned philosophers and critics have gained universal acknowledgment in locating cultures, speaking of the previously unspoken and lending their voices to those underprivileged and colonized who have not been in a position to represent themselves without mediators, but have also failed to understand the peculiar and ambiguous realities of Central Europe.9 Schwarz used the chronic indeterminacy in defining Central Europe as a possible culturological space of freedom in which to postulate a utopian region. He sees the search for Central Europe as utopian not because it is a no-place (ou-topos) but because it shares the same historical conditions with imagined geopolitical entities known as utopias, including a nostalgic tone used in utopian narratives, which made them eu-topos, a pleasant place. More precisely, regardless of geographic location, viewing Central Europe as a political utopia contains the intrinsic program of freeing its inhabitants from the obligatory history superimposed by external agencies of power. Schwarz hopes that such narratives of utopia, once taken from the dimension of political and philosophical fiction and applied to Central European reality, may provide Central Europeans with an adequate theoretical apparatus employable in a process of self-liberation. He believes such a new narrative could bring them, at least mentally, into another, yet-unknown dimension of history and of their own histori25

cal imagination. Unfortunately, his narrative is drawn from an imaginary past, not looking to a particular future. Beyond the sphere of intellectuals of Central European descent like Schwarz, however Central Europe still has a marginal position in the mainstream of todays cultural investigations. A thematic issue of Critical Inquiry entitled Identities.10 illustrates this. In the introduction to this volume, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates write, The calls for a post-essentialist reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common (255). According to Appiah and Gates, one of the most urgent issues which might be understood, if this reconception works, is the resurgence of nationalism in Eastern Europe. Generally speaking, there is nothing wrong with their general statementexcept that it is too general to be useful in redrawing the concepts of identities active in any newly-emerging Eastern European States because it reduces the identities of Central and East Europe to a single category. As they see it today, the most pronounced revivals of nationalisms have not even taken place in Eastern Europe; unless prominent post-colonial locators of cultures like Appiah and Gates were suddenly to embrace the Yalta Agreement (1945), not as an international treaty or a mere political declaration, but as an actual geo-political demarcation of contested nationalisms, one which accurately determines the natural location of peoples and cultures presently engaged in neo-nationalistic discussions as simply part of an East or West. Yet given the entirety of Appiah and Gates work, this reductionist position is very surprising. What is confusing is the discrepancy between the terminology they use to locate their subject (in this case, a nominally Eastern Europe) in a contemporary context which recognizes a much more diverse European geography of margins and dominant cultures and their very useful and effective de-colonizing discourse which they increasingly employ to re-read and re-interpret such reemerging cultures in spite of their geographical dis-location. What is the real signifier of Eastern Europe to them? This omission becomes especially worrisome because their statement introduces an essay entitled The Time of the Gypsies by Katie Trumpener11 with focus on the representations of people without History in the
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narratives of the West, as she details the position of Gypsies in Central Europe. This essay was submitted to the editors of the thematic issue as a part of Trumpeners book on Central Europe as a transnational area. Although in 1992 there were some problems (even some local wars) in the former Soviet Union (Ukraine, Azerbejdzan, not yet Czechnia), the main outburst of violence between the members of different groups was already taking place in the former Yugoslavia, while the most pronounced partitioning between the two peoples happened in former Czechoslovakia. These two events took place in Central, not Eastern Europe. At the same time in Hungary, neo-Nazis started brutal propaganda campaigns followed by deeds targeting mainly, but not exclusively, Jews and Gypsies. Although they were officially part of the Eastern Block, none of these countries had ever really belonged to Eastern Europe. Where are Bratislava, Prague, Karlowy Vary? Where is Budapest? If a resurgence of European-style nationalism is taking place in Eastern Europe then, where are Zagreb, Dubrovnik, and Split on Appiah and Gates identity map? Appiah and Gates have thus mapped and re-mapped post-colonial identities while failing to distinguish between Eastern and Central Europe. In so doing, they have unilaterally decided that the newly emergent (or should we say re-emerging) independent countries located in between the blocks politically known as East and West (countries such as Croatia, Slovenia, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, etc.) belong to the Eastern Block. Shortly after World War II, after the artificial and very pragmatic division of Europe introduced during the Crimean Conference, the aforementioned countries did indeed belong to the Eastern Block, which had pretentiously and inaccurately become identified with Eastern Europe. However, this fact should not overshadow the truth about this political construct imposed by the Great Powers, a construct specifically opposed to historic and cultural context of the region. Although the Three Men of Yalta were on a mission to stop the war, to determine and further pursue provisions for a permanent peace in post-Hitler Europe, their narrative and its consequences were deeply grounded in a colonial discourse familiar to the older superpowers such as
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Great Britain and France. Their rhetoric conveys a sense of duty and obligation to divide and rule, a strategy always followed by different power centers in their need to justify a conquest or an occupation. The language employed in the Conference, as well as the political implications that followed the Yalta Agreement, is echoed in transparent imperial narratives, such as this one offered by Joseph Conrad: We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step in. We are bound to. But theres no hurry. Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of Gods universe. We shall be giving the word for everything--industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Surits Sound and beyond it, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall run the worlds business whether the world likes it or not. The world cant help it--and neither can we, I guess. (Nostromo 77) The Western imperial powers of the nineteenth century easily continued their self-justifying narratives well into the twentieth: The world cant help it-and neither can we, I guess. In spite of its inherent irony and Conrads self-distancing from the characters imperialistic arrogance, this statement is essentially colonial, just like the phrase The New World Order which was manipulated by the George Bush administration to justify American military intervention in Kuwait in 1991, later invoked in President Clintons 1995 address to the nation in support of yet another intervention in Bosnia, or the more recent one aimed to stop the Serbian orchestrated genocide of the Kosovars. Such a statement is colonial because it assumes the existence of a powerful us and powerless them for whom our help is absolutely essential on their way to freedom. For us, on the other hand, this invasion of their public and private sphere is not avoidable, because it is both understood and represented as a historical necessity and logical consequence of our position in the world. Such rhetoric is as clearly at play in Central and Eastern Europe as
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it is in the further-renewed (post)colonial maps of the Middle and Far Easts with which Appiah and Gates are more familiar. These are maps of political conquest, not historical identity or cultural affiliation. Such geopolitical narratives about a higher cause or a mission were equally representative of the public sphere in times of the Crusades: they were used to deify Isabellas and Ferdinands business aspirations embodied in Columbus so-called voyages of discovery; they launched colonization of Africa, Asia, Australia, Americas. Finally, they guided Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in their division of the World after the Second World War. The colonial gesture reenacted in the Crimean Conference is thus too obvious to remain unnoticed. Although their stated global mission was to provide both Europe and the World with a stable and definite peace settlement, the Big Three never reached agreement. Moreover, although they endorsed free elections and proclaimed political independence for the liberated nations of Europe, they did not establish an effective plan to ensure that goal. The injustice was not only to Central and Eastern Europe, because, from the Western point of view, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin also left countries like Austria under occupation until 1955 and the German Democratic Republic in limbo until 1989. Such an incomplete mission left enough provisional space for all kinds of interventions by the power-centers surrounding the region and, in consequence, once again left the borders of Central Europe undefined, fluid and utopian. More precisely, these inconsistencies tacitly endorsed and facilitated Stalins post-war imperial policy in which Russian or Soviet Communism colonized Central Europe. That was the case of a classic imperialist substitution, in which an imposed geopolitical narrative annihilated the rich cultural strata of the independent countries in Central Europe and prescribed their future as Western colonies of the new greater Russian empire. In this sense, Central Europe officially perished in Yalta. Not only did free elections and political independence become fictional, but the entire region was subordinated to the Soviet Union and proclaimed to be Eastern Europe. As Schwarz confirmed in this gesture Central Europe, once again, lost its independent historical
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and geopolitical narrative,. Even now, in 2003, after the Russian decolonization, these countries narratives have not been recovered or reclaimed their part of the universal attention paid by theorists to other postcolonial regions. This open issue puts the future application of Appiah and Gates theoretical position in a particularly questionable light. For contemporary intellectuals dedicated to speaking up in favor of the underprivileged, it is inappropriate to equate a superimposed post- war political compromise among the plural identities of a trans-national region with actual borders and intersections of different traditions and cultures. The Yalta Agreement did not pacify only the political and military superstructure; however, it also affected the public sphere, and thus the intellectual discourse of many critics, poets, and philosophers who, without questioning its geopolitical status, decided to objectify it. They allowed a hegemonic substitution in which politics imposed by the superpowers erased other possible realities of Central Europe. As a consequence of this substitution, an unnatural construct (the Eastern Block) became real by consensus in a political act which relocated Central Europe from its historical realness to the realm of fiction. It has taken almost half of the century for the region to re-enter the gaze of discussions. Yet in spite of its comeback, the existence of Central Europe is still being questioned on many levels, becoming less and less utopian in many a sense (as eu-topos or ou-topos). The mistake of dislocating the region in question, either by removing it to the realm of fiction or by erasing it from the maps, becomes even greater when pursuing the question of postcolonialism in relation to the departure of the world superpowers from Central Europe. One soon realizes that Appiahs and Gates type of anti-essentialist analysis is extraordinarily precise and perfectly useful for explaining, for instance, the Czecho-Slovakian divorce followed by Yugoslavian custody battles -- even though these dynamics may be taking place in an officially nonexistent part of the world. In spite of their misconception about Eastern and Central Europe, Appiah and Gates do provide a methodology for the successful understanding and possible overcoming of the current identity crisis in the var30

ious regions of Europe. In order to emphasize its importance I will briefly demonstrate the use of their rather disembodied model by grounding it in an example from the most extreme Central European crisis today. The experience of the former Yugoslavia particularly speaks in favor of their theorys anti-essentialism in discussing identity in a national culture. When defining a singular identity for a nation, essentialism presupposes possessing something as the crucial category underlying the problem. To understand the identity of any particular group in essentialist terms, one must argue that we are not able to understand who we are, without evaluating us as fixed or stable entities of some sort. Moreover, this evaluation is never conducted in and of itself, but always in comparison with others. Such an evaluation of national essence as individual and group possession of objects essentially linked to the soil is, in fact, presently happening again in all parts of the former Yugoslavia, as it is in other so-called successor states of the former Soviet Union. As an essentialist group-cognition or self-recognition proceeds, it always happens at the expense of others--others who must be available and present to the historically self-proclaimed majority in search of its own identity. And, unfortunately, there is no better way to conduct such a search than in a war of some sort. The Serbian attempt to carry out the genocide against the so-called Albanian minority is an example of how arbitrary a group proclaims itself as a majority. The fact that 90% of Kosovar Albanians lived in the province was not powerful enough to secure their logical majority position. The closer the enemy is, the more convincing and thus real the imagined danger becomes, and the lack of a groups own identity, before it is even addressed by its members, projects itself onto the unknown but threatening other. Once singled out, recognized and defined, others are looked upon as obstacles in the imagined development of a national self and, as such, have to be neutralized for the imagined self to become real. Civil wars, for instance, are the most suitable vehicles for the elimination of such identity dilemmas. In these cases, the other is a fiction made up to define us. In Central Europe, such an identification or evaluation of us thus automatical31

ly also isolates and evaluates as positive everything that we claim that is ours, an act which is impossible to perform without simultaneously fencing in the space of our selves. An identity search, in an essentialist condition, naturally gains support of a geographical map viewed not as schemes for geopolitical and cultural location, but as the major tool in taking away territories which a group needs in order to adjust them according to its own deeds. In such a context, it is natural that geopolitical narratives have distinctive consequences for personal identities. Such a contested political space is thus itself a consequence of this process of self-recognition rationalized by new historical narrative, through the evaluation as other of all the entities which do not belong to our communicative space. This newly- circumscribed space is defined not in terms of an original or natural environment, but rather in terms of the objects that must be adjusted to our needs in that process of self-definition. The new us does not have the same reference as the we had at the beginning of this identity search; similarly, we are not us in terms of a positive self-recognition, but rather we become us through the negation of not-us entities singled out and labeled as the historically empowered annihilating energy which constantly endangers our invented us. In terms of personal identities that arise, the new us skips the moment of positive definition which, once postulated, would perhaps answer the question who we are, and becomes instead a set of alienated wanderers, members of a nation that has been called into existence by our convincing ourselves that we can and ought to become masters of all the objects in our newly-created geo-historical space -- a space to which we are naturally (essentially) entitled. In such an environment, to be (a Croatian, for instance) theoretically equals to have (things the Croatian way). Practically, it also means that the survival of one group, regardless of its ethnic, racial, or social background, directly depends on the demise of another group(s). From the eminently Central European example of the so-called successor states of Yugoslavia, such as Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, it is evident that the essentialist act which takes possession of a cultural space leads directly to a war. In such a war, physical extermination logically follows
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the theoretical process of identifying ourselves through alienating the others because it is based upon the false premise that we are not what we want or ought to be. On the contrary, before we even attempt to answer the question who we are in positive terms, we rush to differentiate ourselves from themselves and continue to strive to base our identity via comparison, claiming that we are and will always bee all that the others have failed to become. In other words, regardless what we do or dont in and for ourselves, to ourselves we will continue to be better and thus more authentic than the others. Such reductionism, paradoxically based on exclusivity, is psychologically and geopolitically at stake in Central Europe.12 According to the colonial narratives that are dominant in representing the region throughout its history, such a primitive psychological strategy for self-description becomes identified as a distinctive quality of its inhabitants, who are usually depicted by the Great Powers as tribes essentially immersed in old and incurable Medieval hatred. And this gaze has hardly been modified since the last three great invasions of Central Europe took place the centuries long occupation by the Habsburgs and the twentieth-century, Hitlers and Stalins military, political and ideological missions aimed toward colonizing the region and adjusting it according to their imperial needs. Appiahs and Gates requests for a post-essentialist reconception of identity are thus of enormous importance for remapping the vanishing parts of Central Europe, and for representing the underrepresented and misrepresented ethnicities that make up the region. Todays most blatant example, the country formerly known as Yugoslavia, speaks in favor of the necessity of their conception. Aside from providing us with the tools to comprehend the Serbo-Croatian or Bosnian war as identity politics as well as fiscal policy, Appiah and Gates antiessentialist scheme can help us understand newly-emerging identity constructs in Central Europe and other so-called democratic changes in Croatia and Slovenia. And that is why it is a particular pity that, by erasing Central Europe, the gaze of these important scholars became a reductionist one, and that they eliminate their possible and real reference as the
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core of the problem to be analyzed. Instead of joining Egon Schwarz in creating utopias (this time seen not as potential spaces of social and cultural freedom, but rather as literally and theoretically nonexistent landscapes) by recognizing it as a unique region with its distinctive qualities, Appiah and Gates could have included Central Europe in their largely discussed post-colonial space, where it temporally and geopolitically belongs, along with the non-Western countries they have already recognized as part of the postcolonial condition of the modern world.

History comes to you: Kafka, Svejk and the Butchers wife

Since theorists from the outside of the region, as well as those who believe that the region no longer exists, have abdicated explorations of identity in Central Europe, it has been left to others to offer their services concerning the missing work. Those others are usually insiders who introduce new versions of subjectivity determined by historical locus new historiographies of subjectivity, based on their lived experience within the region. To be a historian-poet in the world of paradigms and the kind of scientific revolutions that were the last easily-recognized bastions of modernism may sound like a disqualifier. The contemporary postmodern condition as described by Lyotard and others rejects the exclusivity of insight that would allow only scientific paradigms to claim to be an statement of dominant focus of knowledge. In this new context, the term historian-poet loses the intrinsic meaning that Western modernity presumed it should have, and survives only as a hybrid whose appeal to the public is largely unrelated to his or her place in the structural web that traditionally divides poetry from historiography as exclusive genres. Significantly, the most recent and perhaps the most fruitful contributions in the search for Central Europe and its historiography are being uttered by the hybrid voices of poets or historian-poets, them34

selves the witnesses or/and victims of the abrupt and mainly unpredictable regional changes that have called the dominant historiography of the past into question. In his Letter from Budapest, for instance, the Hungarian author George Konrad gives a personal account about his sense of the plural and peculiar identities of Central Europe. Aware of his regions globally subordinate position, squeezed between Soviet-style state socialism and North Atlantic liberalism, Konrad writes: We [Central Europeans] have been argued over, agreed upon, traded, sold, dismembered; we have been the subject of peace conferences and settlements. The First World War started in Sarajevo, the Second in Gdansk, the world better pay attention... (Cross Currents 2 [1982] 12.) The voice of the colonized is easily recognized in Konrads summary of the historical sub-position of Central Europes peoples. His voice is especially interesting as an competent insiders own representation of the colonial struggle historically imposed on Central Europeans, who in the current media are usually depicted as tribes with the distinctive medieval characteristics of hate and savagery.13 To overcame the familiar feelings of uneasiness and noble boredom which confront every writer writing on topics familiar to himself and yet new to his audience, George Konrad employs a straightforward confessional narrative to make contact with a variety or readers whose knowledge of Central Europe is impossible to predict. At the 1990 Lisbon Conference on Literature 14 sponsored by the Wheatland Foundation of New Yorkthe conference that marks the reemergence of Central Europe onto the world stage as a contemporary cultural problem, Konrad spoke about the problems of locating Central Europe. Repeating his well-known belief that the notion of the region is a profound historical phenomenon which transcends the boundaries of political blocks and calls them into a question by surviving all the superficial changes of the maps, Konrad offered a historical analysis:
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I guess that the only wealth that people in our part of Europe have is history and memory. We share a common history with people with similar ethnic and national backgrounds. Its really astonishing how often small historical details come up in conversation among people in our countries. In Hungary, for example, people date their own biography according to some important dates of our century such as 1946 or 1956 but Im sure that they are ready for some new dates! A time ago I lived in a village and in this village there was a butcher. His house was on a street corner and the street was on an incline. In the proximity of this village there was a military base. Once, while the butchers wife was in the bedroom changing sheets, a tank came through the wall into the room because the road was icy, slippery, and the front of the house was destroyed... The next time I saw the butcher, I asked him what happened. History came in, he said. Probably thats a typical relationship of people with history: they dont jump in but history jumps in. For instance, you may find yourself in this comical Kafkaesque situation where somebody comes for you... Many, in the older generations in these countriesthose who are more than 50, 60 or even olderare sure to have, in an otherwise banal and normal life-history, some quite colorful personal anecdote, in which they were heroes in spite of themselves, heroes in the Svejkian sense of Jaroslav Haseks novel. They didnt want the war but the war came to them. It means that its hard to avoid the intrusion of historical events, events which otherwise would be outside the context of their personal lives. (Cross Currents 9 [1990]: 92-93.) The example of the butchers wife is just such an episode that speaks about the intersections of local regional dynamics and a variety of colonial concepts where a superimposed narrative of history visits individuals, intruding itself into their most private rooms in a world where the difference between public and private sphere is nonexistent.
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Another example, taken from the deontic world of literature, speaks of another individual to whom history came. This less-private intrusion of history into the life of a person has been canonized in Jaroslav Haseks famous novel Good Soldier Svejk. Writing about the roots of Central European ambivalence and commenting on the most prominent symbols of Mitteleuropa, Paul Hoffman remembers this famous soldier: A Prague-born writer, Jaroslav Hasek showed in The Good Soldier Svejk (1921) how a sly dealer in stolen dogs who had been redrafted into his regiment after being medically discharged on account of chronic feeblemindedness manages to fool the bureaucracy and survive World War I. (Viennese 34) Despite of some conceptual problems in Hoffmans idea of fooling the bureaucracy, this may well be the brief plot summary of the book. Before Svejks famous detours from the official and obligatory history imposed on citizens of Central European countries are examined, it should be remembered that Central Europe is an alien theme not only for outsiders such as Appiah and Gates whose all-encompassing academic mission tends to oversimplify facts but for insiders as wellas Schwarzs analysis suggests. In the early 1980s, a group of poets, among whom the most prominent and most outspoken opponents were Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky, started a long-lasting controversy about the existence, notion, and significance of Central Europe. In these controversies, all parties were oversimplifying their own insiders political narratives in order to establish their Central Europe as part of Europe and the World after the fall of the political blocks. The beginning of this on-going argument was Kunderas wellknown essay The Tragedy of Central Europe. The authors vision of the decline of his essentially western country, located in the distinctive region of Central Europe, first appeared in the New York Review of Books (1984). It begins rather dramatically:
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It is November 1956. The director of the Hungarian press agency, just a couple of seconds before the fire from the Russian tanks will destroy his office in Budapest, using telex, sent the message to the world. It ended with these words: We are dying for Hungary and for Europe...(The Tragedy of Central Europe, qtd. in Gordogan 18-19 [1985]) In this historically accurate testimony of a dying insider, what is important for locating Central Europe is not only that Hungary is not represented as an Eastern European country, but also that Eastern Europe is seen as the villain. Later in the text, Kundera offers his vision of the tragedy of Central Europe in these terms. According to him, Central Europe is not the same as Eastern Europe: Central Europe is the most European part of Europe made of families of small peoples not determined by geography, but by culture and destiny. His real Eastern Europe is Russia, a Russia which is not really Europe because, according to Kundera, modern European culture finds its roots in the Renaissance and the Enlightenmenttwo periods in Western European history that never took place in Russia. Kundera states explicitly that Orthodox Russian civilization is in contradiction with the (transnational) idea of Europe and works against it, especially against the idea of Central Europe as an independent sphere. As a part of Russian Orthodoxys imperialistic game, Slavism or the ideology of the Slavic worldis, for Kundera a mere political mystification that emerged in the nineteenth century. Unlike the Russian and/ or Pan-Slavic monolithic cultural stratum that Kundera shows victimizing Hungary, Central Europes identity is thought by Kundera to be based on a cosmopolitan culture which had Jews as its constitutive element in the Twentieth Century. The real tragedy of Central Europe, he believes, is its post-war barbarization of the Western European civilizationa barbarization which is most probably the effect of American political and cultural domination. Kundera concludes that the result of those mechanisms is the decline of European self-recognition and the loss of the European powers sense of responsibility for the destiny of Central Europe. To simplify his essay and focus on the pragmatic consequences of his ideas, we can follow the historian Ivo Banac, who stated 15
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that Kundera emphasizes an unfortunate harmonic dualism in which the nostalgic idea of the Slavic outsiders yin has to cope with the aggressive yang of Russian imperialistic conquests. In his contradictory Slavic anti-Slavism, Kundera has actually created a new conservative utopia out of his East-Central Europe. In Kunderas own words, the cultural space of Central Europe can be circumscribed as follows: Gustav Mahler wrote a farewell song to a world that was disappearing. Musil, in The Man Without Qualities, speaks of a society that, without knowing it, has no future. Hermann Broch understood contemporary history in terms of a breakdown of values. Kafka conceived of the world as an infinite bureaucratic labyrinth, in which man is hopelessly lost. Jaroslav Haseks brave soldier Svejk imitates the ceremonies of the surrounding world with such zeal that he transforms them into an enormous joke. In this activity, which could hardly be less heroic, Hasek finds a last trace of freedom. It is from Central Europe that a lucid form of skepticism has arisen in the midst of our era of illusions. It is a skepticism that is attributable to the experience of an extremely concentrated history: we have seen the collapse of a great empire in the course of our century, the awakening of nations, democracy, fascism, we have seen the Nazi occupation, the glimmer of Socialism, massive deportations, the Stalinist reign of terror and its downfall, and finally, we have seen the most essential thing of all-the death throes of the West within our own countries and before our own eyes. (from the interview given to Alain Finkielkraut, published in Cross Currents 2 [1982] 28-29) This passage notes that Central Europe has not had its own historiography. Not only does it lack its systematic historical narrative, but also whenever it gets close to its own cultural identity through personal histories such as Kunderas, that cultural identity is always
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already lost. The reality of Central Europe is thus fixed within a paradox of its own historical time that never allows the present to speak for itself. Even the authors such as Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, Vaclav Havel, and the like, who through their personal narratives have attempted to offer an accurate picture of Central European reality, have found their voices silenced by censors. Almost everyone who did not emigrate in the Sixties served time in prison, or was silenced by the regime within the borders of their own country. Those particular gestures conducted by the occupying forces of the Russian Communist Army produced a delay between the events and the stories about these events, a delay which again determines the peculiar sense of time in Central Europe. This kind of historical delay as a consequence of the oppression produced a strong belief among the Central European intellectuals that not only the present and the future have to be gained in the on-going identity search, but also that the past, suppressed in this way, needs to be recovered. Unlike Franz Kafkas idea of a past that needs to be earned, Kundera sounds suspicious thinking about the lost cultural identity of Central Europe. In his pessimistic account of the region, Kundera strongly suggests that Central Europe is dead, killed by The three wise men of Yalta who detached it from the Western World while showing no interest in its great culture. Yet paradoxically, Kundera also accuses the West of colonizing Central Europe in its own way. According to Kundera, the West itself has undergone a process of self-colonization carried out through the oversimplified market-oriented logic of late capitalism. Although the West has always been identified with power and imperialism, Kundera promotes the idea of a West that has been colonized by narratives of the economic identities at stake between Western Europe and the United States of America: My country is not capitalist, nor do I think it wants to become so again. And yet, it is an old Western European country and it wishes to retain this identity. The West continues a common history, a common culture. But the cultural dimension has dropped out of the contemporary
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vision of the world. In the ridiculous theater of allegory that todays political thinking represents, it is the West that plays the role of the colonialist. That is why the idea of a colonized West does not enter into the current system of symbols, and why this idea is poorly grasped today and refused. Not only is my country a colonized form of Western Europe, but it is even a colonized West that has in turn never colonized anyone else. (18) Kunderas Central Europe is part of Europe, but a Europe that has not yet succumbed to the international homogenizing action that the real West has undergone, a Europe with identity narratives written in terms other than economic. If Kundera is to be believed, colonial criticism can help reinterpreting these narratives of Central Europe. At least in its initial stages, the region has to undergo an emancipatory process. Sufficient historical grounds must be established in order to widen already-existing horizons of expectation not only about what the West is, but also about how Central Europe relates to the West and the East. Such a broadening has already been used in explaining Anglo- and Frankophone colonial models, which, as we have seen in Appiah and Gates, still act suspicious about deciding to consider Central Europe as a colony. In so doing, to remain more faithful to the mechanism of colonization of Central Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, critics should use a spatial rather than a temporal model. In spite of the subtle differences between colonial dynamics, those differentiating the colonization of Africa and India from those employed in the Austrian and later German and Soviet conquests, the consequences of colonization are the same in both cases: a dominant historiographic narrative has been imposed on a region at the expense of the regions own histories. In this respect, it is also significant that the twentieth-century colonization of Central Europe, whose blueprint is the post-WorldWar-II Yalta Agreement, took place after the rest of the world had already undergone a process of decolonization. Also, in its initial stage, this twentieth-century colonization is predominantly political, where the nineteenth-centurys was prevalently economical.
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Because of its centripetal colonial structure, for instance, the Habsburg Monarchy, at least at a first glance, can help us illuminate this different, less conventional, model of colonization in Europe. In his attempt to negotiate such a colonial presence, Kunderas notion of a colonized west initially sounds puzzling. In todays symbolic order, the West itself is equated with Imperialism, Power, Colonization, not as a colonial region. Therefore Kunderas concept of a colonized West within the Western cultural block calls for a re-conceptualization of the existing notions of power. In order to avoid a further terminological confusion while differentiating Central Europes political and cultural existences, a closer look needs to be taken of Kunderas idea that his essentially Western country actually has been colonized by imperial Greater Russian aspirations cross-dressed in the red caps of the global communist revolution from the East, and from the self-colonized West on the other side of Europe. In his interview with Alain Finkielkraut, Kundera states: The big Western countries identify themselves too easily with the values belonging to the entire West, and they also attribute their own sins too easily to the entire West. But the West is also made up of little nations who have no reason to feel guilty for the crimes of the larger countries and who have right to defend their western culture without remorse. (18) According to Kundera, then, the Wests history narratives are not sensitive enough to the complex problems of Central Europe. Due to its historical course, the dominant West has abandoned the cultural particularities of its nation-states and entered yet another, more global phase of economic Westernization, in which all the individual and territorial values of Italy, Spain, and France, for instance, have been blended into a new hybrid entity heavily influenced by the U.S., called the West. Theoretically, Kunderas nostalgic longing for the times in which our Western civilization, aware of its spiritual values in establishing a notion of an unalienated individual, was not that open to
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be objectivized that way, has its parallels in the Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and other philosophers who examine the endangered totality of a pre-industrial West. Those thinkers nostalgically lament the disappearance of individual values as the West engages in a process of becoming victims of mass media, economic reductionism, and other oversimplifying manifestations of the unification of the market-oriented Occident. 16 Yet Kunderas nostalgia for a moment before the West turned into a block should be taken with caution, because it assumes a linear idea of progress in the West (and East), which is in opposition to a history that acknowledges an eternal struggle in Europes center. His favorite example of the director of the Hungarian news agency and his telex message to the world disclosing the Russian military offensive, culminating in a statement how they (the Hungarians) will die for Hungary and for Europe, is the core of Kunderas bitter critique of the western Europes historical amnesia. He is convinced that no one grasped this pronouncement less well than Europe itself because in the non-occupied West, it is not understood that Europe is capable of standing for values that one can still die for (19). Criticizing the new Western identity as an economic block, Kundera himself has made an almost identical cognitive mistake historically employed by the colonizer, known as pars pro toto, a conclusion which confuses a part with a whole. The entirety of Hungary or Czechoslovakia was not dying for Europe when the Soviet tanks occupied the streets of Budapest and Prague. There were, to be sure, individuals who did die in for these ideals, such as that brave director of the national news agency, or Jan Palach, a student who publicly set himself on fire in order to protest the Russian colonial presence in Prague in 1968. Similarly, citizens of Prague were protesting the occupation by laying on the streets, in front of the Soviet tanks. On the metonymycal level, such acts can be taken as representative of a nation and its story, but in their essence they belong to individuals. Although captured by the occupying forces, these individuals decided to demonstrate their own personal freedom in a Sartrean way, looking to a suicide as the way out of existential and physical slaveryas a way out of an unacceptable change in the domi43

nant history which came to them regardless of their will. It would be wrong to assume that no one in the West would be willing to do the same in a similar situation. To claim that those examples reflect a universal state of affairs in not-yet-spiritually-colonized Central Europe would be too bold. But, if we agree to embrace the idea that the realities of some European countries can be more spiritually intact than those of Americanized Europe, Kundera may be right in calling attention to the West as spiritually colonized by the United States. In spite of Kunderas seductive narrative about the tragedy of Central Europe, one should be cautious making such generalizations. Employing them may easily be regarded as yet another (in this case, individual) colonial gaze, now critically aimed at the United States. Kunderas gaze perceives Europe as it was in its mythical good old days, as the non-American, non-economic West, in contrast to his current experience of chronic Occidental amnesia in which his Central Europe keeps sinking lower and lower, perceived as a victim of the East in the eyes of the American capitalist media. Living in the gap between the West and East was a problem for other contemporary writers as well, usually those who, like Kundera, at least in their beginnings, represented so-called minor literature, a literature produced outside the dominant imperial powers. Franz Kafka is a favorite early example for analyzing the position of such minor literatures 17. He is an author whose paradox becomes paradigmatic for those cases in which the work of a writer surpasses those provisory boundaries of a minor discourse and enters the so-called mainstream, and due to that subversive act, undermines reductionist divisions of literature. Minor literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari is not a literature of a secondary importance, but a literature whose performance is based on a notion of deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is a technical term that addresses the dynamics of individuals desire to move away from the fixed categories of perception, representation, and meaning that limit their lives. Unlike Freuds fixed category of Oedipal desire, deterritorialization refers to the wandering, nomadic quality of a self that is constantly being redefined, and as such, one which is subversive of
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more traditional hegemonies based on the firmly-centered authority of historical tradition.18 Aside from being a minor writer in the previously outlined sense, Kafka was very puzzled about his own identity. As a Jew whose generation had experienced a failure of a cultural, economical and religious transition in Central Europe, and had found itself in between Western and Eastern Jewry, Franz Kafka expressed his confusion about his contacts with East and West on many occasions. One of the most telling confessions can be found in a letter to Milena Jesenska (1920). He sees himself as a presumably Western Jew from Prague who feels disconnected from the history and tradition of the Eastern European Jews who remained faithful to their communal and religious life. He lives instead in the alienated and historically-fragmented world partitioned between small nationstates with various languages, a world where, as he puts it , everything has to be earned (Letters to Milena 218-19): I have one peculiarity which in essence doesnt distinguish me much from my acquaintances, but in degree a great deal. We both know, after all, enough typical examples of Western Jews, I am as far as I know the most typical Western Jew among them. This means, expressed with exaggeration, that not one calm second is granted me, nothing is granted me, everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past toosomething after all which perhaps every human being has inherited, this too must be earned, it is perhaps the hardest work. (Letters 218-19) Although Kafka here most probably targets the absence of cultural and political continuity which, according to him, has been present in western Christianity (further confused by the geo-cultural divisions between the two types of Jewry), what is the most interesting in relation to Kunderas comments about the colonized West is Kafkas sensitivity toward history and ideas of progress. Unlike Kundera, who believes that the spiritual past was better than the material present, Kafka does not accept a naive linearity of time.
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Cosmopolitan in ways of being a member of a deterritoralized ethnic and cultural group par exellence, from his deterritorialized nomadic perspective, Kafka does not believe that inheritance is natural, but that it is made. Therefore, according to him, everything has to be earnedthe past, too. In the process of earning the past, in re-configuring falsely ideologized and idealized history both created and later directed by grand narratives of representation, the role of countermemory as the underpinning of counterhistroy, becomes crucial. Its plural, individual, locally grounded corrective narratives of authenticity whose specific power is described in Vaclav Havels concept of the power of the powerless posses the energy to reorganize the conundrum of historical assumptions based on hegemony. Countermemory acts from the peripheries of power centers that proclaimed historical facts. It is a reaction to hegemonic, created truths in historya reaction whose main goal is to undermine the grand-narratives claims to objectivity. Countermemory belongs to a subject outside official history, outside hierarchya subject whose individual psychology recognizes the importance of a narrative of authenticity, familiar with destinies such as Kafkas. In such a trans-national and trans-cultural framing of what history is and means, it remains to the individual to adjust to the constantly emerging circumstances in the peculiar cultural space of Central Europe, a space in which even the past looks alien to its inhabitants. Kafkas past is not lost, as Kunderas is. It is rather under construction. Kundera and Kafka agree on one thing: there is an unusual and complex relation between universal and particular categories in Central Europe, because by addressing one issue (of a Western Jew living on the outskirts of the West and yet far enough from the East, or of the colonized West), it can all-too-easily seem as if the entire space of Central Europe has been addressed. It is hard to accept such a concept because in Central Europes colonial situation, all Central Europeans are other not only as a collective entity but also as individuals. Oppressed by superpowers of the age even before the Habsburgs fully emerged in 1521, Central Europeans never had had a chance to examine the normal segments and constituents of their lives. Always guided and owned by Others
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(Habsburgs, The Third Reich, Russian/Soviet Communism), Central Europe has simply accumulated an enormous number of problematic identity narratives that overlap and, at the present, are ready to explode, rather than to be analyzed. That is the situation of Kunderas colonized Czechoslovakia a consequence of the past that has to be earned, a process so familiar to Kafka from his individual perspective of a spiritual and religious crisis. Although in his letter to Milena, Kafka asks for the possibility of re-building his own symbolic order and understanding his own self, by virtue of Central Europes complexity, the past that Kafka needs to earn cannot be separated from the fragmented but very firm structure of the Central European complex. He is not simply East or West Jew, he is a Western Jew living in Prague, speaking German and writing in an artificial variety of standard German language in a Czech country controlled politically by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Kafka, Svejk, and the butchers wife whose bedroom was visited by a tank share the consequences of such an undifferentiated set of cultural strata that constitutes the reality of Central Europe beyond any simple economic or political narratives. History came to Svejk in the form of Austro-Hungary. His assumed feeblemindedness enabled him, through imitation of the system, to become a metonymy for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. In Kafkas case, history is even closer to the essence of an individual. It enters ones apartment. Some agents, the insiders, another metaphors for the system not knowing the difference between private and public sphere decide to step in and arrest someone as an outsider who is not aware of his own hiding, just like it happened to Josef K in The Trial. Issues introduced in Kafkas writings thus again seem to be universal, and can be interpreted in infinite ways. Yet from the perspective of Central Europe, the events described in his novel The Trial, for example, are very realistic and particular. Unlike George Orwell, Kafka did not need to write an anti-utopia. He just followed a familiar paradigm of absolute deprivation of historical and individual space, the kind of deprivation usually prescribed in manuals that deal with totalitarianism. For an outsider, reality in all three cases looks like a utopia (or dys-topia), like a scheme of destruction outside real historical space.
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Unfortunately for those who had witnessed and experienced that same reality as their own fictionalized reality, imposed upon them from the outside, such events are parts of their lives. Josef Svejk, Josef K, and the butchers wife share experiences of the same kinds of historical and political intrusion. History came to them. And this intimacy between the particular and the universal characterizes every event in Central Europe, in its past, present and future. Each time Central European individuals meet such a dominant narrative of history, they experience a so-called domino-effect in which either their sense of themselves or their sense of historical truth necessarily dissolves. The former is the case of Kafkas heroes; the latter, of Svejk. For them and their fragile geopolitical identities, it is impossible to move a part without disturbing the whole. In such dynamics between historical narratives and narratives about individual lives, what seems unreal, phantasmal, tragi-comic, becomes real. In consequence, traditional genres compete with one another as individuals try to understand and explain the Central European complexity of their lives by reference to a patchwork of traditions, all of which apply sometimes. In Haseks case, Central Europe is seen as an epic, and also as a comedy. In contrast, Kundera likes to call it the tragedy of Central Europe. The Butcher was satisfied with his contribution to the oral literature. Robert Musil and, to some extent, Miroslav Krlea write their epic utopias with strong colonial premises. Musils Kakania from his Man Without Qualities and Krleas Blitva from his novel Banket u Blitvi (The Banquet in Blitva) are imagined as anti-utopias in which the reality of Central Europe is reduced to the mechanics of their imagined communities.

Performing Central Europe

Josef Svejk and the Loss of Historical Narratives Analyses of the location of Central Europe do not look encouraging for a scholar who wants to analyze the reality of the region as the consistency of its narrative problems. Although geographically
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as well as ideologically far apart, Kundera, Appiah and Gates share a methodological assumption which enriches the rhetoric of the present discussion, but leaves its grammar intact. They discuss the crisis by thematizing it on its own theoretical level. The evanescent reality of Central Europe documented in the individual historical narratives speaks against verbalizing the identity crisis of this region, either in the language of intellectual description enriched by the implied formulas for change (Appiah, Gates) or as a nostalgic lament of an exiled poet of a nation whose innocence after 1968 once again remained unprotected (Kundera). To avoid the vicious circle of verbalizing crisis in this way the subject can be brought closer to literary studies, and this geocultural crisis can be represented in a work of fiction. The puzzle called Central European identity can be, one hopes, accurately addressed through a singular deontic (Dolezel) performance that of Josef Svejk, whose life story explicitly calls the story of his country into question. Like the Butchers wife, Svejk was paid a visit by history. An examination of several his representative deeds facilitates the location of Central Europe from within, from the perspective of a soldier and the man whose Svejkism, or mental dimness, has ever since been practiced in Central Europe under Nazi and Communist domination as a form of a passive resistance. In his book Viennese, Paul Hofmann states that Svejks luddic acts are enabled by Emperor Franz Josefs system of government. According to Viktor Adler, one of the founders of the Austrian Social Democratic movement, and to many others who lived the real consequences of that fictional world of mates, tortes, and operettas, the entire system in which Svejk had to live too, was absolutism mitigated by Schlamperei, where Schlamperei connotes messiness, inefficiency, and a lack of exactitude. Even nowadays the Viennese are accused of Schlamperei by North Germans and the Swiss. Nevertheless, in Vienna, Schlamperei sounds appealing and has amiable overtones of humane laxity (Viennese, 34). If it were not for Schlamperei (a diagnosis of chronic feeblemindedness by the army officials in a totalitarian world is not a disqualifier for those who want to avoid the senseless duties imposed on them), Svejk would not have been able to fool the bureaucracy
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and survive. After all, as a demented private of the glorious imperial and royal soldiery, Svejk had to live in a world like that Hoffman described by: Proverbial virtues of the Viennese bureaucrats were urbanity, frugality, moderation, and punctuality no Schlamperei in reporting for work on time! Franz Josef had been an admired model: his iron bed was legendary, as was the meticulousness with which he invariably appeared at the exact moment scheduled for an official function, not a second early, not a second late. His stock response to every opening of an art show, agricultural fair, or new building was to say, It was very nice, I was very pleased. On the last day of his life, on November 20, 1916, the eighty-sixyear-old emperor went to bed earlier than usual, telling his attendant to wake him at 3:30 A.M. because there is so much to be done. He died in his sleep (Viennese 35). To preserve humanity in an empire with a centripetal colonial order that has its center of imperial attraction in Viennathe city in which all the values and limitations of officialdom were embedded in its intrinsic sense of hierarchy, rank, title and authority many other historical facts had to be avoided. To ridicule the Viennese syndrome of verboten that helps elide truths that do not fit into this hierarchy as forbidden, Robert Musil said: If for some reason crime were allowed in Austria, it would be committed by officially authorized criminals only. Svejk was not from Vienna. He was from Prague. But, as one of the anchors purportedly holding the Empire together, Prague was one of the approved circles on Franz Josephs centripetal map of power. In totalitarian regimes fear grows proportionally with communication on the relations between center and province; Prague had to deal with centralizing demands of the Emperor, which by the time they arrived there from Vienna, had been blown out of proportions. A manifestation of such dynamics of communication, the call for obedience launched from Vienna encountered Josef Svejk sitting
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in the tavern, calmly drinking beer and telling stories from his never-ending repertoire. In spite of his officially-recognized feeblemindedness, Svejk could not avoid the call of history and he was drafted a footsoldier in Franz Josephs army. After his fictional escapades during World War I, Svejk became a hero. However, his personality remained intact and absolutely unassuming. On a broader, geopolitical scene, he was always (essentially) a Czech while behaving, for a while, Austro-Hungarian. Perhaps the best way to introduce him is Haseks own Preface: GREAT times call for great men. There are unknown heroes who are modest, with none of the historical glamour of a Napoleon. If you analyzed their character you would find that it eclipsed even the glory of Alexander the Great. Today you can meet in the streets of Prague a shabbily dressed man who is not even himself aware of his significance in the history of the great new era. He goes modestly on his way, without bothering anyone. Nor is he bothered by journalists asking for an interview. If you asked him his name he would answer you simply and unassumingly: I am Svejk... And this quiet unassuming, shabbily dressed man is indeed that heroic and valiant good old soldier Svejk. In Austrian times his name was once on the lips of all the citizens of the Kingdom of Bohemia, and in the republic his glory will not fade either. I am very fond of the good soldier Svejk and in relating his adventures during the world war I am convinced that this modest, anonymous hero will win the sympathy of all of you. Unlike that stupid fellow Herostrates he did not set fire to the temple of the Goddess in Ephesus just to get himself into the newspapers and schools books. And that is enough. (Svejk i) Regardless of its museal reality, even before and during World War I, Habsburg history remained the obligatory narrative for Sve51

jk and all the inhabitants of Central Europe. The police and Army had infiltrated meticulously into the reality of the Central European families of small peoples who have been effectively melted into an amorphous whole for Franz Josephs consumption. Neither Svejk nor any other great everyman could circumvent this obligatory history. He was drafted and redrafted ad absurdum, no matter how often he was officially discharged. And that repetitive enactment of sameness in all its absurdity is the most realistic way of depicting the fantastic boredom and predictability of the Habsburgs. That boredom is evident in the way they kept imposing their official identity on regions by violating regional cultural and geopolitical identities. To avoid succumbing to such a history, Svejk had to take an active role in perpetuating its absurdities. To remain Czech in his hidden essence, for instance, he had to play a role of an Austrian, and his theatric performance had to be exaggerated. His humble reports addressed to superiors have driven everybody crazy; but isnt this just a reversal of the kind of absurd communication between two agencies that do not make sense in themselves, while making a kind of sense in juxtaposition? Therefore, it would be hard to agree with Paul Hoffmans statement that Svejk managed to fool the bureaucracy. Folly works much better if it has an agency of reason against which it can perform. Svejk did not fool the Habsburgs, because their police was perfectly trained to spot those who fooled. Those who fooled usually perished. Instead, Svejk mirrored both the bureaucracy and the Habsburgs. Not literally, not by creating a mirror image of the Emperor who died comparing and identifying himself with history at the dawn of a day when there was so much to be done, but as somebody who, within the limits of law, imitated the same totalitarian pattern of that center of power. He simply did his duty, just as those powers-that-be expected, and in so doing, he showed the absurdity of those expectations. Svejks amazing work-avoidance program was not based on disagreements and refusals. On the contrary, Svejk performed according to the letter of the laws. Svejk did not fool the system; he was the system. He did not live in the world of rational and standard roles; he lived in the world whose reality (at least for the last hun52

dred years) was based on imitation of reality, imposed by someone elses story. Many historians assert that Franz Josephs own empire was mainly the imitation of his ancestors legacy: The Emperor himself was not really able to perform his official duties. The framework of his actions was as equally dislocated, temporally, as those personal historical narratives of the Central European writers who, by virtue of their manipulated reality, have always been a little too late to relate to the present. In order to be less ridiculous and more real in his public attempts to preserve the imperial image of the declining dynasty, Franz Joseph had to imitate the performance of an Emperor, a twice-crowned Monarch who nonetheless died with a pathetic cry for more work and more order. In his near symbiotic harmony with the system, Svejk also imitated the actions expected of him in his unique way. His imitation was perfected by his command of the verbal and nonverbal signs of the Empire. In order to undermine the surreal and absurd system of the Habsburgs without being seriously harmed, Svejk had to achieve the level of existence theoretically assumed by the rulers. According to their totalizing and totalitarian narrative, their empire was the only historically-permitted reality for the region. The realness of the Dual Monarchy, on the eve of World War I, was based upon this archaic and historically displaced symbolic order. As such, it was imposed on Central Europeans as yet another colonial narrative of greatness to which they had to live up. In such a context the best way for an individual to uncover the falsities of the regime and to reveal its absurdities is to cope with it through exaggerated obedience based on an absolute compliance with all details. As a product of that machine, Svejk chose to become absolutely real within the system by not admitting any reality outside of it. As seen in terms of Hegelian dialectic, the relation between Franz Joseph and Josef Svejk is a relation between a master and a slave. The theoretical scheme produced through the colonial narratives of the Court also negated the existence of everything outside the system. It is precisely because of this negation that the entire conquest of Central Europe became both possible and real as a (hi)story. Convinced that the borders of their empire contain the
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only existing universe, a colonizer invading Central Europe entered a space where nothing existeda space of historical, legal, and cultural void. In spite of being a perfect colonial narrative in action, once repeated within the system, the same performative act of absolute reductionism gains absurd qualities. Hegel argued that the theoretically-acceptable narrative of a master, which serves as a justification of a conquest after it becomes the intellectual property of a slave, it eventually undermines its originators. Negating the reality outside the Monarchy brought glory to His Imperial Majesty. The same negation of the outside world, reflected through the eyes of a supposedly-demented private of the imperial army, also revealed all the absurdity of such an unjust project. This initially subordinate position of a slave, who, after he applied the methodology introduced by his master, revealed the insanity of such a totalitarian concept. Svejks performance enriched everymans perspective on the Habsburgs politics and turned him into a literary hero. This mechanism can be seen in the closing scene of the first part of Good Soldier Svejk, in a dialogue between Svejk and Lieutenant Lukas: Do you know Svejk what a march battalion is? Humbly report sir, a march battalion is marshbatzak and a march company is a marshkumpachka. We always use abbreviations. Very well then, Svejk, said the lieutenant in a solemn voice. I wish to tell you that you are going with me on the marshbatzak, if you like such abbreviations. But dont think that at the front youll be able to drop such bloody awful clangers as youve done here. Are you happy? Humbly report sir, Im awfully happy, replied the good soldier Svejk. Itll be really marvelous when we both fall dead together for His Imperial Majesty and the Royal Family... (Good Soldier Svejk 238) In the deontic conditions of Haseks fictional world, Svejks luddic space is circumscribed in the time and space of an absurd binarism, the binarism of a world in which nothing is permitted, but
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where everything is either obligatory or prohibited. 19 Since there is no space for public disagreement with this historical power, Svejks devoted imitation of absurdity enables him to take numerous detours from the obligatory history. In consequence, his detours are not his escapes from history, but playful and adventurous escapades (Dolezel) pointing to an unexpressed reality beyond that history. One of Svejks greatest escapades takes place during his transit from Prague to Galicia. 20 After he missed his train, he decided to continue walking toward the front lines on foot, which produced an intolerable delay. Upon his arrival at the front, he was told by his superiors that, in addition to his own lateness, only half of the soldiers from his transport successfully made to Ceske Budjeovice, a destination assigned by the army, and warned that his long absence could be considered desertion. Svejk shares with the readers his attitude toward obligations imposed by history by replying, every train which is going to the front will think twice before bringing only half a trainful to the end of the station (511). This sincere statement verbalizes Svejks luddic position within a transitory and restricted space, somewhere between the permanent domains of obligatory history and prohibited freedom. In Svejks performative, the objective reality of the Dual Monarchy, imagined and explained in Franz Josephs official narratives, becomes what in fact it really isan objectified and dehumanized reality unable to accommodate the differences of many of its subjects. Unlike the Luddites, the early 19th Century workmen who, convinced that machines were the reason of the enslavement of their labor, protested by destroying machinery, Svejk chose to embrace a mighty engine as his equal and communicate with it on the same level. In so doing, he comes much closer to the core of the problem of a dehumanized and alienated self than the Luddites ever did. Svejks communication with the machine that partially moved him through Habsburg space revealed the essence of an individual objectified by an inhumane system. In Svejks case, a slave ridicules his master by making the masters absurd concept painfully real to both sides of the binary opposition. In a conversation with the locomotive, Svejk underscores that the Habsburgs saw him (and others like him) as mere
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object. Talking to the train is an applied introspection of a kind, a self-analysis in which the good soldier, through an absolute acceptance of the terms of existence imposed upon him, once again ridicules the Habsburgs totalitarian universe. Due to the totalizing and totalitarian reality of the late Habsburg Empire, Svejks imitations of actions enable him, through his absolute obedience and unity with the Empire, to become permanently unable to accept his obligations without undermining the effects expected of his deeds. History is imposed on him, absolutely and repeatedly. He has no opportunity to adapt his actions to its requirements, voluntarily or intentionally he has become the requirements nameless and faceless object who cannot actively change his position because he is a subject deprived of his own self. Confronted with a very powerful historical absurdity, Svejk simply mirrors it back through his imitative gestures, as part of an on-going dumbshow that allows the reader to see how silly the values of an enslaved world can become, once such a world is depicted in its true dimensions. By mirroring this kind of reality, Svejk can confront it indirectly, by playing games. Although his mirroring strategy is insufficient to influence history, it has very serious consequences for the authority of history. In his deontic performance, Svejk thus does what the intellectuals discussed above are not able to do with their essays: he points to the absences at the very center of their fictional duality between East and West. Moving along with our soldier, and escaping further and further away from the centers under the control of Franz Joseph, Josef Svejks Central Europe resembles his voiceless being it is either different in terms of folly or a permanent historical draftee of the Austrian colonial politics.

From Svejk to the post Soviet successor states

Kunderas Anabasis Given the persuasive voicelessness of Central European Svejks and the nostalgia of the intellectuals in addressing Central Europe, it
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is logical that there remains a confusion regarding the real and imagined maps of the region. Because of its hybrid cartographies and the polyphony of regional histories, real and fictional locations of Central Europe embrace both intellectual constructs and actual concepts that reflect the existence of a trans-national entity. Therefore, Central Europe can even be defined as a cultural attitude, rather than as a political. economic or social sphere. Svejks performance, for instance, can make the region the ultimate imagined community, rather than a geographical entity. Czeslav Milosz can be seen as a representative of the first extreme according to which Central Europe seems to exist only in the minds of some of its intellectuals (Central European Attitudes Cross Currents 5 [1986]: 101). In his account, Central Europe has a strong awareness of history, and although it is regarded as an act of faith, a project, a utopia, it is still seen by many as a realistic project. Its real grounds are to be found through a substitution in which cultural borderlines or, better for this approach, trans-cultural reality of Central Europe, takes the place of its political divisions. Such cultural energy feeds on the power of its locality, of its cultural details which, once put together, transcend the politically-introduced diversity of borders that has conventionally been seen as the major obstacle in accepting the existence of the region. Like Milosz, Josef Skvorecky sees Central Europe as purely emotional and spiritual issue, deeply grounded in its rich history and in the awareness of its distinctive cultural historicity rather than a real site on a geographical map. The bases for such a distinctive spiritual existence of the region are to be found within its cultural history. According to both writers, Milozs and Skvorecky, Central Europe, is not necessarily a geographical concept; however, it is still a part of Europe, closer to the West than to the East, with its unique Central Europeaness which refuses to be identified with either the West or the East. Claudio Magris, for instance, firmly believes that the distinctive qualities of such a culture can be found in its tendency to analyze and to defend the individual against the totality. This model of a spiritual community is probably the most important development in rethinking the notion of Central Europe since it merg57

es nations cross-culturally and transculturally. Such dynamics theoretically open a space for a geopolitical fluidity able to accommodate the many faces of Central Europe, from the colonial and imperial narratives which organized such a hinter-national world 21 a world simultaneously beyond the nations and behind the (Great) nations, to its more recent postcolonial situation evident after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the newest re-unification of Germany. Although Magris recognizes a flirtatious fashion behind the widespread intellectual desire to locate and re-model Central Europe, he still sees it as a real entity based upon a strong and clearly-enunciated statement of the regions unease toward history and of resistance against that unease (Budapest Roundtable, 30). In many of his writings and interviews, Magris still can define Central Europe as a metaphor of protestagainst the Soviets occupation of the East and the American way of life in the West. These two seemingly contradictory approaches exemplify Magris method in transcending the limitations of binary oppositions, a strategy widely exploited in his hinter-national narrative Danubio. Since, regarding to the many, Central Europe is both: a real geographical entity and a fictional, nostalgic world of transnational and timeless spiritual narratives the difficulties to grasp the region in fixed and positive terms comes as no surprise. Many other authors have taken part in the cultural-historical debate regarding the question of the absence or presence of Central Europe over the last century. Eugene Ionesco describes the Habsburg Empire not only as a spiritual mosaic, but as a multi-ethnic confederation whose disappearance from history left a serious political void. Although aware of the oppression which made individual needs of smaller peoples unified under the Austro-Hungarian rule nonexistent, Ionesco finds the absence of the Monarchy irreplaceable. His lament differentiates a culture from a nation, proclaims culture superior to a nation, and thus allows Central European cultural differences and similarities to link various nations and nationalities in a trans-national project. Such cultural or mental space enables the inhabitants of Central Europe to be different and unique in terms of their individual fixed identities, but still similar in their giv58

en possibility of coexistence. Ionesco sees this kind of transcultural and cross-cultural existence as a model of new justice for the region, a fresh principle to organize humanity, a principle that has a serious chance to be employed in organizing a society. He states: It would have so many human lives and assure so much peace through a new kind of freedom, where each person would be master of himself, of his philosophical and religious convictions, and of his spiritual autonomy. The confederation of a new Mitteleuropa could consist of not only Austria, Hungary and Romania, but also Croatia and Czechoslovakia. Only the individual governments would be wholly autonomous, and the chief, king, emperor, or president would merely be a master arbiter, remaining respectful of the personality of each of the countries making up a confederation. This vast confederation, this empire in the best sense of the word (as was the Roman Empire), would constitute Europes, humanitys unique defense against Russias pseudo-ideological barbarity and spirit of conquest. This vast federation would be our spiritual universe and our indispensable political force. (The Austro-Hungarian Empire - Forerunner of a Central European Confederation. Cross Currents 4 [1985]: 6) Like Kundera, Ionesco expresses an aggressive anger toward the Russian spirit of conquest, but his solution still reveals a Eurocentric attitude toward the Other. His so-called confederation is not worked out carefully enough to be taken as a serious optimal projection for the region in question. Unlike Schwarz, Kundera, and Milosz, Ionesco is looking for a future, but by ignoring the scopes of smaller peoples under the Habsburg rule, he still ignores very real alternative histories whose absence has deprived the region of its real past. A similar discussion about the future construct of Central Europe (on the horizons in the last decade) can be found in Endre Bojtars study, Eastern or Central Europe.22 This Hungarian intel59

lectual is perhaps the most realistic among the aforementioned authors in thinking about the future of the middle European lands: Many saw the remedy in a Central European federation of states, beginning with proposals such as the Austro-Slav federation of the Czech, Frantisek Palacky, then the Danube confederation of Kossuth, all the way to the Balkan federation between Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians and Greeks proposed by one of the chief ideologues of the Bulgarian rebellion in 1876, Ljuben Karavelov... Perhaps it is no coincidence that just such a federated state-Yugoslavia-is the only one that withstood the trial of history for a relatively long period of time. (Eastern or Central Europe Cross Currents 7 [1988]: 255) The disintegration of Yugoslavia (just two years after Boytars essay) did not kill the dream of Central Europe. It just violently rewrote the historical narratives emphasizing the extreme manifestations of the regions instability. All who dreamed of a confederation or of an alliance of the small states agreed that the danger to this kind of Central European existence comes from the superpowers, regardless of their geographical location. In order to become real, to acquire their own historical narratives, those small states need to live apart from the colonial presence of the West and the East. Unfortunately, the present situation speaks against any political resolution emerging to organize the reality of Central Europe from within. History has proven that the stability of, at least, Europe, if not the World, may depend on the stability in the Balkans. Today, in 2003, with the UN and NATO presence in ex-Yugoslavia, and with the Russian colonial attitude toward the same region, it would be hard to predict its future. However, as Kafka said, not only the future, but the past has to be earned and understood. To locate it properly on the global map, an approach to the present situation of Central Europe from the colonial perspective is of utmost importance. Central Europe is real, not imaginary, even though it has not yet been written into its own historical existence.
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Although Kunderas remarks about a colonized West and the lost innocence of Central Europe may be exaggerated, one should bear in mind their pragmatics, because, although improvised, they do emphasize the distinguished and distinguishing elements which speak in favor of Central Europes uniqueness and complexity. Unlike earlier nostalgic laments which designate the West as the oppressor, Kunderas critique of the Russian colonial attitude is ultimately much more precise and effective, and needs to be further pursued to understand the Czech exiles perspective on the regional dynamics. Kundera, in fact, offers a utopian version of Central Europe, including a possible paradigm for its existence that would include its own geopolitical and geocultural realities. In his text An Introduction to a Variation, Kundera introduces this new outlook on Central Europe by explaining why he prefers Denis Diderot over Fyodor Dostoevsky. Shortly after the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Kunderas books were banned, his public activities outlawed, and he had to look for alternative ways to earn a living. A theater director from Prague asked him to write, under his name, an adaptation of Dostoevskys The Idiot. In spite of his situation, Kundera refused, and decided instead to reread Denis Diderots Jacques le Fataliste. According to his own testimony, Kundera did not understand his aversion to Dostoevsky in the beginning. Unaware of their origins, Kundera later questioned his sudden negative feelings, trying to connect them with the Russian occupation, but the Soviet military presence was not the answer to his reluctance to adapt The Idiot. He also agreed that his aversion had nothing to do with the aesthetic value of Fyodor Mihailovichs writings. Still not completely understanding his reaction, Kundera found that his annoyance was not making claims to objectivity (Cross Currents 5 [1986]: 469.): What irritated me about Dostoevsky was the climate of his novels: a universe where everything turns into feeling; in other words, where feelings are promoted to the rank of value and of truth. (469)
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Something about that transformation blocked Kunderas ability to work with Dostoevskys text, he thought. That Dostoevsky himself was not the object of Kunderas disturbance finally becomes clear in his 1968 episode. On the third day of the occupation, he drives from Prague to the town of Svejk famous escapadeto Budjeovice: All along the roads, in the fields, in the woods, everywhere, there were encampments of Russian infantrymen. At one point they stopped my car. Three soldiers began searching it. Once the operation was over, the officer who had ordered it asked me in Russian, kak chuvstvuyes?--that is, How do you feel? What are your feelings? His question was not meant to be malicious or ironic. On the contrary. Its all a big misunderstanding. he continued, but it will straighten itself out. You must realize we love the Czechs. We love you! The countryside ravaged by thousands of tanks, the future of the country compromised for centuries, Czech Government leaders arrested and abducted, and an officer of the occupying army makes you a declaration of love. Please understand me: he had no desire to condemn the invasion, not in the least. They all spoke more or less as he did, their attitude based on the sadistic pleasure of the ravished but on quite a different archetype: unrequited love. Why do these Czechs (whom we love so!) refuse to live with us the way we live! What a pity were forced to use tanks to teach them what it means to love! (470) The problem that kept Kundera away from Dostoevsky is neither his style nor his possible ethnic identification with the occupying forces, but rather a painful reminder that Dostoevskys characters incorporate a manner of elevating feelings to the level of an operative rationality. Kundera has nothing against feelings. On the contrary, they are for him very noble. What horrifies him is that authors repeatedly-demonstrated mechanism for understanding feeling as values
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in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds of behavior outside of real historical space (470). If in such a substitution as proposed by the behavior of Dostoevskys characters, individual, national, or class feelings (or the mixture of all the aboveas is most probably the case of that Russian missionary-officer), are allowed to fill up the absent space rationality, they can become a theoretical justification for social and political horrors and thus enable an existence of such a world in which a man, his breast swelling with lyric fervor, commits atrocities in the sacred name of love (470). The example of such an emotionalized space is the space in which Russians meet Czechs convincing them that their military deeds, instead of violence inherent to every occupation, in fact, promote their love and concern for the future of the occupied country. Although, in Kunderas context, elevated feelings are epitomized by the Russians on their mission of Central European conquest, they are not the exclusive property of Eastern civilization. On the contrary, these sentiments are very Christian in Western, Catholic terms. Appreciation for feelings and a sentimentalizing will to power through politics is an age-old Christian concept. After the Renaissance, Kundera believes, that this kind of romantic sensibility has been balanced in the West through doubt and reason -- a shift and appropriation that had driven the contemporary liberal Western mind to accept relativity as a fundamental factor in liberating and pursuing human deeds. According to Kundera, the lack of such a balanced humanist concept of doubt and reason is exactly what differentiates Russian concepts relating sentiments and real historical deeds from those in use in the rest of Europe. Because it missed the Renaissance, Russia thus maintains a different balance between rationality and sentiment (471), a balance, or imbalance, in which the famous mystery of the Russian soul can be found. The present identity crisis in Russia suggests that such mystified Russian soul can easily misinterpret historical sensibility in the everyday lives of average Russians.23 Kundera thinks that this rational irrationality -- the result of an absence of the paradigm shift that was supposed to have taken place in the Renaissance -- landed in Czechoslovakia in 1968, carried on the Russian tanks. In consequence, he
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dislikes Dostoevsky--Dostoevsky who does not balance sentiment with reason. He dislikes him because of his seductive narratives impregnated with high emotions, with outbursts of feelings which are beyond control, beyond any historicizing or relativizing. As a product of such a symbolic order, the Russian officer does nor ask who are you, which would require a geopolitical, ethnic, and personal act of self-recognition; he asks how do you feel, meaning how do you react on yet another intrusion in your own space of repeatedly proscribed personal and political freedom. Defeated by the occupation, mentally exiled from his country before he embarks on yet another exile (this time, a physical one), Kundera concludes his analysis of the rational irrationality of the immediate East with the following words: Faced with the eternity of the Russian night, I had experienced in Prague the violent end of Western culture such as it was conceived at the dawn of the modern age, based on the individual and his reason, on pluralism of thought and on tolerance. In a small Western country I experienced the end of the West. That was the grand farewell. (476) Although one may feel an uneasiness reading Kunderas generalizations about Russian attitudes, their imperial politics throughout the centuries has provided the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being with enough evidence for creative doubts about their benevolence regarding Central Europe. It is interesting that not only Russian tanks, but also Russian Nobel Prize winners for literature, can think that Central Europe is a work of fancy, a pure phantasm. Joseph Brodsky, a voice of that Russian presence in his and Kunderas famous polemics, characterizes the Czechs exile and his own thoughts regarding Dostoevsky: Having lived for so long in Eastern Europe (Western Asia to some), it is only natural that Mr. Kundera should want to be more European than the Europeans themselves. Apart from anything else, this posture must have consider64

able appeal for him, because it endows his past with more logical links to the present than are normally available to an exile. It also places him at a good vantage point from which to chide the West for betraying its own values (what used to be called European civilization) and for surrendering certain countries that have tried to preserve in that civilization against terrifying odds. (482) Because of the way he appropriates Czechoslovakia for the East, Brodskys statement can hardly be taken seriously. Apart from the serious set of culturo-logical contradictions apparent in his treatment of both Europe and Europeans, his tone is a lecturing one, and his rhetorical position unnecessarily elevated above Kunderas. Yet, Brodsky reacts as he does simply because Kundera, excludes Russia from Europe and Central Europe. Brodsky rejects the politics behind Kunderas definitions of two conflicting types of subjectivity currently operating within the region. Being excluded from the European sense of self that Kundera asserts, Brodsky continues by insisting that there is no such thing as Central Europe (recycling the colonial metaphor of Western Asia, where Asia has a derogatory meaning), thus superimposing the Russian pravoslav culture on decadent Western values. Brodskys logical conundrum is evident in his terminology: Having lived for so long in Eastern Europe (Western Asia to some), it is only natural that Mr. Kundera should want to be more European than the Europeans themselves. For Brodsky, Europe is clearly Western Europe only; and his Eastern Europe is nothing but a smoke-screen for the poet to promote a new and fictitious cultural, geographical and political entity from which the entirety of Central Europe is expelled. By talking down Mr. Kundera from a recognizable imperial perspective that remained silent in front of the Russian tanks in Prague, Brodsky actually lends credence to the Czech authors fear of the Russian presence. Russias grand-narrative does not hesitate to patronize the citizens of the occupied countries, pointing out that all those years they were wrong in thinking that they were Western, or uniquely Central in their cultural independence, and that they truly need their loving and lovable Eastern
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mentors to teach them their ways of life through the imposition of their own forms of historical experience. In addition to the polemics between Kundera and Brodsky about the notion and status of Central Europe, the most pronounced confrontation between proponents of these two different viewpoints took place at the famous 1990 Lisbon Conference. This confrontation highlights the other side of the issue of dominant histories, offering different historical narratives with their new forms of subjectivity based on individual experiences of Central European history. The one who finally made Brodsky admit to his paternalistic tone (also clearly heard from his colleagues Lev Aninsky and Tatyana Tolstaya) was Susan Sontag. Associating herself with George Konrad, Danilo Ki, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Czeslav Milosz, and other advocates of Central European decolonization, she objected to the overall Russian tone which demonstrated that the Soviet writers were not interested in the countries called Central Europe because they strongly felt that the problems of Central Europe would be solved after the problems of Soviet Union were solved (120). She denounced such attitude as horrendously imperialist and immoral position (The Lisbon Conference, Cross Currents 120) because of its assumption of Russian ownership of the region which negates the possibility of parallel development of Central and Eastern Europe. The first person to reply was Josef Brodsky. In attempting to dismiss Sontags charges, the Russian poet said: Of course, its not an imperial position. Well, it is simply the only realistic attitude that we Russians can adopt toward the problem. And to call it imperialistic, to charge us with a sort of colonialist attitude -- colonialist disregard of the cultural and political realities... Well, I think its terribly myopic. I would add one more thing. As an anti-Soviet concept, the concept of Central Europe is not effective (120). Later in his reply to Susan Sontag, Brodsky also attempts to distinguish writers and intellectuals in a similarly unacceptable way. He believes that writers in general, and especially those who sat at
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the conference and represented either Russia or the remnants of the Soviet Union, are not determined or defined by a political system. What defines a Russian writer, according to Brodsky, is the Russian language, the language in which a Russian writer writes. As such, according to Brodsky, he or she is liberated from the requirements of the political system by entering a cultural system. A Russian writer, Brodsky believes, is not a representative of the Soviet State, and so it is not incumbent upon him or her to comment on the Russian military presence in Central Europe or Afghanistan. With all due respect for this poet laureate and Nobel Prize winner, it is very hard to accept his one-sided and arrogant analysis. His arguments do not hold when held up against the realities of the various historical narratives in the region. The assumption that writers are defined by a (national) language, not by petoljetka or perestrojka, regardless of their differences, does not grant them the comfort of silence in face of the wrongdoings of their government. The question being asked was not whether Josef Brodsky could send the Russian tanks back to Russia, but whether or not he (and his colleagues) could question Russian occupation on the basis of their subjective experience of history and use his public persona to condemn the conquest. Unfortunately, his subjectivity did not react to Russian occupation in terms through which immanent narratives of Central Europe could be recognized. Resisting such a call to possible engagement, Brodsky calls the occupation of Central Europe (that same region which, according to him does not exist) a political reality and completely dismisses the regional-cultural dimension. His realism, according to Susan Sontag, is nothing but imperial arrogance. To say that one is not interested what happens to small countries because it is not realistic for him or her to think of their destiny in independent terms reveals imperial arrogance. Also, to exempt himself from facing reality of the conquest by placing his creative persona in the realm of national culture, and to the divorce the connection between power and culture in process of colonization is simply shortsighted and wrong. With such pressure from both sides of Europe, Central Europeans find themselves existing, yet unrecognized, between two cul67

tural powers, looking for a place of their own, both in terms of their historical position and of the forms of individual subjectivity that these historical narratives engender. In other words, a model for Central Europes postcolonial cultural condition must accommodate not only Haseks ironic use of historical narratives, but also the sense of self which he develops creating Svejks deontic space whether the authorities of history approve of them or not. Similarly, Kundera knew that his Prague was undergoing a shift in geopolitical narratives, but he was accustomed to constant historical dynamics of a change. What was disturbing was the new kind of subjectivity that had been forced on him, first on his way to Budejovice, and later through Brodskys world-view. The very existence of attitudes such as Josef Brodskys ask for a more complete study of Central Europea study which would incorporate all facets of the regional as well as individual identity politics.

A Central Europe of our own

In order to employ the discourse of colonial theory in analyzing Central Europe, several discussions need to be mentioneddiscussions usually among writers, in which the region has explicitly been addressed as a colony. In Central European Attitudes, Milosz outlines how countries in Central Europe went through periods of prosperity in their earlier history, but nevertheless all were still subjected to foreign domination, losing their claim to national identity. His critique of colonial presence in Central Europe speaks of foreign agencies such as the Turks, the Austrians, the Germans, and the Russians. Even earlier, the Romans and the French had successfully exploited the region. To this point, the quest for a model of Central European identity, liberated from the colonial presence of the foreign agencies, has evolved by reference to federations of the small states. The end of the First Word War, for example, in which not only the Germans were defeated, but two empires collapsed (Habsburg and Tsarist), brought about two federations: one of the Czechs and the Slovaks,
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and another composed of the South Slavs. Unfortunately, the national independence from the superpowers did not last long, because just thirty years later (1939) two of the strongest nations, the Germans and the Russians, signed a pact that wrote them out of active history. The aftermath of the Second World War similarly enslaved Central Europe once again. Even though the Germans disappeared as a superpower, the old Tsarist Russian attitude came back (this time as Communism), which then occupied the small countries on the outskirts of what is geographically known as Western Europe. Czeslav Milosz comments the Western and the Eastern presence in Central Europe after the World War II: In an era of anti-colonialism, at the very moment the British Empire and the French Empire were crumbling, independent states of half of Europe were converted into colonial satrapies controlled from outside. Those satrapies send their delegates to the United Nations-more correctly, not united nations but disunited governments. The basic fact is the border of the empire and the garrisons of its army, while the mentality of the masters is felt by the subdued populations as alien, nearly incomprehensible and barbaric. Russian self-admiration, more than that-self-worship, goes beyond the habitually expected range of national vanity and bears the mark of a XIXth century messianism which in that part of the world left no good memories. Similarly, Russian contemporary art and literature, obstinately clinging to clichJs, frozen by censorship, seems sterile and unattractive. Yet innumerable soldiers Svejks in their dealing with Russians must pretend their reverence and gratitude for Big Brother (Central European Attitudes, Cross Currents 5 [1986]: 103) These centripetal colonial moves, whose dynamics are being followed here from 1521 to 1990, can be regarded as the slow process of Central European colonization and decolonization followed by its temporary resolution after the new unification of Germany,
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which can be seen as an opening moment allowing a postcolonial situation to emerge. The problem of re-creating the nation states cannot make such postcolonial dynamics fruitful, but a long lasting period of colonization can hardly allow increased awareness among the new, regional but firm, power centers. The phenomenon of recreating nation states illuminates two serious problems. The first is a practical one and it seriously undermines democracies in their development. It is difficult not to agree with the assumption that a nation-state, despite the reality of Central European centuries long colonial condition, is an outdated and archaic form of homogenizing ethnicities produced either by a subjective and feudal conscience of a hegemon or by hegemonic blindness in front of the contemporary demands as a result of colonized minds. The second problem is a theoretical one. It underscores a slow process of decolonization within the regiona process that needs to be understood and examined in the context of global decolonization that took place half a century before the actual collapse of the Berlin Wall. When the French and British empires were declining, losing their colonies (especially after 1939), those independent states of Central Europe were once again converted into colonial satrapies (Milosz). What for rest of the world was the age of decolonization, following the colonial reforms that started in 1918, for Central Europe was yet another colonization. Miloszs remark briefly summarizes the regional colonial dynamics, suggesting what general types of historical narratives have been imposed on Central Europe. Speaking retrospectively, Milosz acknowledges another defeat of the otherwise culturally rich Central European attitudes. His personal historical narrative explains how a figure like Svejk can leap into Soviet hands, bringing his own Habsburg legacy into post-World-War-II Europe. Such a subjective repetition of history calls for a brief historical summary of colonial presences in Central Europe. Prior to World War I, Svejks story was narrated from a political periphery toward its center. Although itself an alternative center of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Prague did not have that centripetal attraction of Vienna with the Emperor on his throne, a presence anchoring all the outskirts of the mon70

archy. In consequence of World War I, new wave of ethnic and national self-definition of Central Europeans took place. Its dynamics were, however, drawn from within the system, from the place where Svejk had already performed his identity imitating a bad Austrian soldier in order to remain a good Czech everyman. At the same time, the existing power blocks involved in the war were writing their official history for the region, not recognizing the voices of its feebleminded inhabitants. While Svejk, by ridiculing the empire through his appropriation of its absurdities, was trying to decolonize his mind, global political re-colonization was taking place in form of numerous battles between the Axis Powers and the Entente. The end of the Second World War brought another colonization, one officially initiated in Yalta in 1945. Central Europe split again and remained undefined, vegetating in the liminal space between the two new world Blocks. That exchange of the nominal owners of Central Europe enabled Milosz to transport Svejk from Austro-Hungary to the Soviet Union, convincing him that his region had yet to undergo a process of self-recognition independent of these colonizers histories. In referring to this history, the non-Russian participants of the Lisbon conference had in mind the recent provisory decolonization of Central Europe, after 1989/90, hoping that the postcolonial question in addressing Central Europe emerged as central. It seems as if, in their struggle to describe the agency of postcolonial Central European subject, the participants asked the following question: are all (historically) postmodern Central European subjects doomed to Svejks mirror tactics and his dumb-show, or will it be possible to use a form of Central European subjectivity not only to resist, but to rewrite the historical narrative of the region? This question became especially troublesome toward the end of the conference. The real conflict in Lisbon in 1990 was initiated by George Konrads remark addressing his Russian colleagues. His challenging tone was mainly a direct reaction to the Russian author Tatyana Tolstayawho, after she has repeatedly been asked about her opinion as an intellectual about the Russian military presence in Central Europe, 43 years after the Red Army liberated it from
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the Nazisremained firm in refusing to issue a statement about the matter. Konrad states: I would like to avoid a false conversation in which I have this unpleasant feeling that colleagues from the Soviet Union talk about eternity, about the cosmos, about the insignificance of the Soviet military presence. Moreover, they say that tanks are small climactic disturbances. I dont believe that these are small climactic disturbances. I believe very strongly that your whole attitude, your whole ethos, your literature, reflects the fact that you are quite cautious with your own reality in the sense that you feel somehow unconnected to your tanks. But I believe that sooner or later, you will have to confront the role of your country in the world. First of all, you will have to think of the world which is closest to you, which is part of Europe and which did not want the presence of your tanks, but which would like to have your presence as tourists, or as friends who come and visit and then go home. In your change of climate, I believe that its not enough to speak only of the necessity to rehabilitate the Russian or Soviet past. It is also necessary to review Russian imperial politics, both of the past and as it manifests itself today. With regard to Europe there should be a withdrawal, at least a military withdrawal from Europe. Central Europe was indeed liberated from the Nazis Third Reich by the Soviet Armies, but this took place 43 years ago, and somehow this anomaly, this provisory situation, has lasted far too long. This war situation, this state of martial law, under which we live after all, must end in this century. So the question is whether our Russian colleagues will have enough moral stance and civility to confront these questions. (The Lisbon Conference 107) This is a clear call to Soviet writers to question what kind of subject position, and hence what kind of agency, they are exercising (even
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indirectly) as part of the geopolitical entity that encompasses the narratives of both Russian soul and Soviet dominance. Konrads angry remark calls not only for the decolonization of Central Europe and its historical narratives, it asks a further question about the role of intellectuals in that historically unavoidable process. What bothers him and other non-Soviet participants of the roundtable is the oblivion that the Russian writers demonstrate in face of the fact that, in 1990, the Soviet army was still in Central Europe. Not only do they not comment on that real state of affairs, but they repeatedly emphasize timeless aesthetic categories such as the beauty of the literary text, the importance of an individual in a creative process, or the notion and greatness of a national literature. Although Konrad is well aware that neither Tatyana Tolstaya nor Lev Aninsky (the two most pronounced opponents to the idea of protest against the Soviet military presence abroad) own these tanks, he is still amazed that they do not see the importance of a public condemnation of the situation -- that they do not see the necessity of identifying their subjectivity vis--vis these historical facts. Since Tolstaya and Aninsky have voices that can reach far, many Central European writers believe that they should assume the role of an intellectual as a public disturbance, and speak up about this anachronistic colonial situation in the heart of Europe. Not only did the Russians remain silent regarding their armys presence in Central Europe during the conference, they also constantly demonstrated their countrys imperial attitude toward the rich cultural region inhabited by the underrepresented groups of peoples whose culture and history have been strangled by the colonizers. To the rest of the participants, it was disturbing that none of the Russian representatives felt a need to look back at the history and criticize those obvious moments which, according to Kafka, need to be earned. They looked at the history as some sort of fatum that reminds of Leo Tolstoys concept of Divine Providence and as such would be expected to contradict the Communist ideologya fatum which is superimposed on the peoples and has to be taken for granted. They still are assuming Panslavism under Russia, as opposed to accepting alternative Slavic cultural spheres. Since underrepresented intellectuals have no comparable public sphere from which to comment on the tragedy of
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their countries, their notion of a superimposed history is quite different from that of an oppressor culture. The two representatives of those countries which are the invaders thus actually speak from the viewpoint of hypothetical villains, not because they took an active part in a military operations, but simply because they have a duty to criticize wrongdoings of their governments, and they are not doing it. Silence on the writers behalf equals agreement with the Russian government from the perspective of the intellectuals outside the power center of the East Block. Through silence, their absence of words is converted into a language of opportunism and collaboration with the colonizer. The Yugoslav writer Danilo Ki, whose books deal with the experience of Stalinism in its original Soviet mode, and whose attitude toward Russians is otherwise very friendly, similarly found himself upset with their pedagogical tone. He explains his frustration: I feel like a small child being taught elementary lessons by Tatyana Tolstaya and Lev Aninsky. Here were talking about literature, were talking about Central Europe, and theyre saying that from the Soviet point of view, Central Europe doesnt exist. This pedagogical tone continues to irk me. Its a Soviet manner of talking and I always feel it irritating. Contrary to what Lev Aninsky said, theyre talking to us not as individuals but as teachers to a group of students: We Soviets are going to explain to you what literature is. Literature is something which is written by an individual. This is something so elementary that Im wondering if I misunderstood something. Also, these other notions: Russia, Soviet Union, the number of deaths... (of the Soviet soldiers in liberating Europe from the Nazis) We know all this. Within this framework, there is the fact: Soviet tanks are in Central Europe... We agree that Lev Aninisky and Tatyana Tolstaya are not sitting in the tanks and arent driving them, but were interested to know whether the presence of these tanks enters into their consciousness at all. Or, is there a sort of Big Brother or Big Sister syn74

drome which condones the presence of these tanks? This is the problem before me. It isnt simply a question of wanting to defend the concept of Central Europe as such; rather this idea is being promoted to counter the concept of Soviet Union so that Central Europe wont just be considered as a part of it and we will have a right to self-identity. There are small countries and small languages that dont want to be homogenized and brought to order. (114) Kis critique echoes Kunderas. Like the Soviet army officer, these post-Soviet intellectuals are asking how do you feel? rather than who (as a Central European) are you? Aside from his very sharp critique of so-called Soviet imperial attitude toward the region, Ki remark opens perhaps the crucial problematics that deal with an individual as a member of a small nation in the de-colonizing worlda search of his or her personal as well as group identity. Ki critique thus addresses not only Central Europe, but the problem of regionalism in general, within the framework of the postmodern condition where nations merge in search of their scattered identities calling their own master narratives of history into question. The binary opposition recognized by Ki, the one between an individual and the state, is maybe the place where one can find an explanation for what is presently at stake in Central Europe, a paradoxical process of recognition as well as self-recognition for both oppressor and oppressed. To appropriate Kis statement and use it as the point of departure, let us assume that Tatyana Tolstaya and Lev Aninsky are the voices of the oppressor, although they insist on remaining detached from their state politics. On the other side, Ki and Konrad speak in favor of the oppressed, again, as individual members of small nations, trapped in between two imperial politics. Both Ki and Konrad understand that their Soviet colleagues are not the proximate agencies of oppression; still, their denial and silence in face of the new Central European reality irritates them. Intuitively, for both Konrad and Ki, writers from the West and the East as well as those from the center are members of a family of intellectuals whose
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consciousness ought to operate actively in the face of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, etc. Moreover, as intellectuals and public figures chosen to represent their countries, writers from both sides are expected to comment on the state of affairs in Central Europe, because Central Europe nowadays is a successor historical narrative for both the East and West, not just for smaller Central European states. Their exchange is the key in understanding the dynamics between individuals and the state in Central and Eastern Europe. Oppressed by foreign agencies for so many years, Central Europeans, unlike their Western counterparts, developed a strong sense of powerlessness and detachment from any power structures, regardless of their origins.24 Characters like Josef Svejk are detached from reality in the most ironic way. Demonstrating their distrust toward the centers of power through numerous comic and tragi-comic situations, Central Europeans yield to the inauthenticity of the colonial presence of the mighty others, and via negationis praise the authenticity of an individual, who, in order to become, has to detach himself or herself from everything that really defines individual both as citoyen and bourgeois, in this case within an alien political narrative. The totality superimposed on their history by the superpowers has control over peoples lives. Yet if the individuals were to accept the hierarchical rules of that totality, they would be swept away by its inhuman dynamics. For an individual to survive in such a world he or she has to take it in fragments, avoiding every hint of a totalitya totality which may be a potential danger. Following this pattern, Svejk constantly identified himself as a super-patriot, a creature as exaggerated as Franz Joseph, the ultimate target of the good soldiers performance. Through the art of imitation, the good soldier mirrored the reality of the Dual Monarchy, and thus survived it. In a process of decolonization, however, Svejks imitation may also be interpreted as the sacrifice of his conscious agency, his will to be human as opposed to given reality. In the deontic world of fiction, Svejks individuality had to enter a mimicry game in order to find its own contextual realization. In the ontic world of the authors, the rules of that game are more danger76

ous. Although Tatyana Tolstaya and Lev Aninsky may produce Svejk-like characters who will ridicule the authorities, when they, as authorities, are asked to issue individual statements about the totality of their experience as procreative and political beings, they chose silence. In so doing, they are reenacting one of the fundamental premises of the state they claim to reject because they recognize it as the totalitarian moderator of their lives. Soviet-type homogenization of Central and Eastern European reality did not destroy only the local qualities of the nations and their cultures, but, in its almost century-old practice, it erased the awareness of individual qualities within their own citizens. In order to escape this totalitarianism which could erase the realness of their fictional works as a reflection of society, those writers who refused to embrace Socialist realism had to claim that their work is nothing but a work of an individual--no more than an individual expression of the world. But individual in this Soviet-context means somebody whose voice does not count, because it is very personal, and, as such, it is a voice that has nothing to do with that states preferred, impersonal, reduced, and dehumanized reality of a group or collective. And in this sense, an individual has no real value or meaning, because all the values are superimposed, larger than ones individual life. The feeling of a mission that had driven that Russian officer who intercepted Kundera on his way to Budjeovice to express his love and care as the only forces which motivated him to visit the writers country in an armored vehicle, is the same feeling that has silenced Tolstaya and Aninsky. Because they have internalized the Greater Russian attitude that an individual has no political significance, they can assert that they do not need to make public statements. Such a constructed reductionist gaze enabled these post-Soviet writers to act as if they were not obliged to acknowledge an individual value for either hypothetical or real small nations and cultures. It is paradoxical how these Soviet people of letters, while advocating the pleasures and privileges of being an individual, a category crucial to make an act of writing real, are not able to detect their own potential role as individuals in using their own consciousness
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to comment on totalitarian phenomena such as military, cultural and economical conquest. Opposing and criticizing the post-Soviet Russian writers, Ki and Konrad have a sense of what Vaclav Havel calls: the power of the powerless, that theoretical insight into the totality of problems imposed on them by the colonizers. As oppressed members of the community of smaller nations, a Hungarian and a Yugoslavian see the problem clearly, and so have the feeling that all the Russians in the debate are speaking about the obvious without being able to agree on the single and self-evident issue of the existence of that obviously real Central Europe outside the various Greater Russian historical narratives imposed on the region over history. This pedagogical tone employed by Tolstaya and Aninsky thus becomes nothing but a new colonial narrative, a narrative once again present in Central Europe, long after the rest of the world has been, at least nominally, decolonized. In a paradoxical way, by praising the self-evident issue of creative writing as a process that celebrates an individual, the two Russian authors actually prove that their minds remain the property of the same oppressor who owns them mentally, just as the tanks of totalitarianism sit in Central Europe, physically. From Ki and Konrads perspective, the captured minds of the Soviet intellectuals are as colonized as the reality of Central Europe, but as representatives of the power structure, deeply entrenched within the Soviet system, they cannot see the implications of the conquest. Ki and Konrad, although precise in their analysis, can do little to open their imperial eyes. Ironically, their position in the dispute resembles Svejks existential emptiness when it comes to making active history. Such a one-dimensional exchange dealing with theoretically self-evident topics is not imposed by the main theme of the symposium. The underrepresented authors of Central Europe would most certainly be happier to use the opportunity to gather in Lisbon to discuss the individual acts of creative writing, but the reality of the meeting between the oppressor and oppressed does not allow them to do so. Instead, they have to de-colonize their mind in order to gain the discursive position from which their newly-acquired language of
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mutual understanding can be heard, and their history rewritten. It is no surprise that the discussion between the Soviets and Central Europeans has provoked a writer with rich colonial experience outside of Europe. Also irritated with the talk, Derek Walcott stated: The imperial voice, in my opinion, dominates this conference and its range increases with every representation by European tribe, by European nation. This is not merely an historical posture of ancestry and tradition which goes under the general name of civilization. I am talking about tone. I think that is what Danilo Ki is talking about: tone. About a linear concept of progress and experiment in literature which I find no different from the presumptions of the priest and the conquistador. (115) Walcotts observation about the reproduction of colonial narratives recognizes that the stronger a European nation is, the more its representatives interpret their constructed histories as natural, taking them for granted. In contrast to such imperial narratives, history of the powerless is a History that comes to you. Its dynamics are seen in the cases of Kafka, Svejk, and the Butchers wife. That intruding history is always superimposed, and its authority is not within individual peoples reach. The official history of the Imperial powers is the only existing grand historical narrative for Central Europe, but as such, it does not lead to understanding Central Europe. History as a mission, present in every colonial narrative, is that force which drove missionaries with their books, swords, and crosses into lands that were never theirs. This same sense of mission in the age of European decolonization, directed the Soviet tanks in the heart of Europe. Similarly, the notion of history as a mission silenced Tolstaya and Aninsky. Their romantic escapism, evident in their infantile adoration toward a humble and self-denying individual who produces literature, is most probably no more than their personal denial of a colonial tragedy. Unfortunately this personal denial has its general and global consequences. As members of a multinational political entity, im79

manently strangled by the Soviet-Russian rule, Tolstaya and Aninsky had to reach for a desperate, self-defeating gesture to hide their already mute consciousness. To close their eyes in face of Central European colonized reality, they must partition it into smaller entities, recognizing Yugoslavian, Czech, Croatian, Polish literature as fragments of the last bastions of historically lost Pan-Slavic culture, politically named Eastern Europe. But that political issue is not important here. Aninsky and Tolstaya even claim that it does not exist for literature. As they say, they do not believe in the existence of Central Europe, and therefore they do not want to talk about it. But such an act of humiliating silence is precisely a colonial act, according to which one does not talk about things in which he or she does not believe. This situation replicates itself across the postcolonial world. British missionaries in Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart did not want to talk about the tribal gods, because they did not believe in them. Northern American slave owners renamed their African slaves because they did not care for African cultural register and consequently for the slaves real names. In the same vein but unwilling to completely erase peoples from their reduced imperial map of Europe, Tolstaya and Aninsky have decided that what counts are those few literary Slavs (Czechs, Croats, Slovenes, Slovaks) who sit in their rooms and write. What comes out of their writing is literature. The cultural location of such literature is of no importance to the Russian writers of the end of millennium, just as it was not for Kunderas Dostoevsky. The paradox of the Russian colonial treatment of Central Europe is contained in Tolstayas and Aninskys outlook on writing and living. For Lev Aninsky and Tatyana Tolstaya, Eastern (Central) Europeans live in a world in which individual values are completely non-existent, but in which individual acts of writing keep people alive in a practical way. For the time being there is no way out of such a circle of cognitive and emotional escapism, because the exit has to be found by an individual in a context with existing individual values. In Central Europe and its culture, such a world is yet to be found. This debate is why the Lisbon Conference must be taken as a milestone in every future analysis of Central Europe from the colo80

nial and postcolonial perspectives. Although such dynamics have existed in Central Europe throughout the centuries, it was in Lisbon that they were named and brought to attention of the West by intellectuals from all over the world.25 Once such a discussion of Central European colonialism and postcolonialism has entered a public sphere and acquired its own idiom within the global language of postcolonial liberation and cultural theory, future studies can be undertaken in which Central European authors can be interpreted through the gaze of colonial and postcolonial criticism, so far principally employed to examine mainly those narratives closely attached to Anglo- and Frankophone modes of colonization.

Central Europe between post and past

An Interim Conclusion The various historical narratives to which the worlds of Central Europe have been attached represent the reality of Central Europe in a postcolonial and in a postmodern condition. In fact, the very existence of Central Europe is a kind of narrative of postcolonial condition; because since the beginnings of recorded history it has been constantly occupied and re-occupied politically and economically. Central Europe has always been able to define a prior colonizer, and its inhabitants have always reacted to the versions of history that these occupiers have imposed onto the region. This permanent postcolonial status by no means implies that Central Europe is entirely fictitious, merely a state of mind, or an unrecoverably lost past entity. Instead, the region has functioned as the limes for the colonizing powers, the periphery for these alien centers. But this periphery has not ever been absorbed simply into the occupiers historical spaces. Characters like Svejk or Josef K, and people like Kundera or the butchers wife, have always remained on the map of this Central Europe to signal or enact the dis-ease of occupation, as well as their own incomprehension and dissatisfaction about the realities imposed on them. Invaded by alien
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laws (Josef K.), transnational military corporations (Josef Svejk), or tanks (Kundera, the butchers wife), they cope with the surprises in more or less active ways by partially resisting the kind of historical sense or official truth that is being imposed on them. For them, and for other Central Europeans, the region exists in real space, but deprived of its own, free, mode of self-representation. In this sense, in its perpetual postcolonial situation, Central Europe is also always in a postmodern condition. That is, its inhabitants and their personal lives call the master narratives of the occupiers histories into question. Such questioning of authorities is done actively (Kundera) or in a mode of passive resistance in which Central Europeans agree to lose themselves as subjects of history, while carefully preserving their locations as independent objects (Svejk). The question raised by Central European intellectuals to Tatyana Tolstaya and Lev Aninsky remains: what is required of an intellectual in the postmodern and postcolonial space of Central Europe, or in the postmodern and decolonizing situation of the former occupying powers? The next chapters will take on that question by addressing the works and ideas of two paradigmatic Central European intellectuals, Claudio Magris and Miroslav Krlea. In each particular case, their reflection, or, sometimes, even the facets of their embracement of respective postmodern and postcolonial situations, depending on the epochal conditions availability in their immediate environment will be explored. The answer, however provisionally, addressing Central Europes status as post will be crucial to understanding how the texts to be discussed, just like the essays and novels mentioned earlier in this chapter, participate in a very consistent dialogue between the East and West, a dialogue in which Central Europe is argued upon, as a set of economically and politically non-dominant countries on the crossroads of two dominant civilizations. By rejecting the idea that the West is a monolith (a claim rejected uncategorically for postcolonial regions outside Europe), these texts call a fundamental tenet of postcolonial theory into question. In their narratives of regional historical recovery, Magris and Krlea appropriate basic notions of postcolonial theory to various realities of Central Europe.
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They are dealing with their nations as post and past a Western cultural tradition that nevertheless fails to grant them either political or cultural acknowledgment of their own, distinct subjectivity as Westerners who cannot exert power and dominance.

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For more, see: Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minessota Press, 1984). John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion, and The Literature of Replenishment, Atlantic Monthly Aug. 1967: 29-34. For an extended discussion of postmodernism in relation to my approach in this study, see: Conrad Lodziak, Manipulating Needs: Capitalism and Culture (Boulder: Pluto Press, 1995) ; Thomas Dochery, After Theory: Postmodernism/ Postmarxism (London-New York: Routlege, 1990) ; Elisabeth D. Erwarth, Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) ; Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) ; Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minessota Press, 1984) ; Hall Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983) ; Philip B. Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1994) ; Honi F. Haber, Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault (New York: Routlege, 1994) James M. Glan, Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993); Mikhail Epshtein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995) ; John Bird, ed., Mapping the Future: Local Cultures, Global Change (London-New York: Routlege, 1993) ; Linda Nicholson, and Steven Seidman, eds., Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge UP, 1995) ; Brian S. Turner, ed., Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (London: Sage Publications, 1990) ; Ben Agger, A Critical Theory of Public Life: Knowledge, Discourse, and Politics in the Age of Decline (London-New York: Falmer Press, 1991) ; Ben Agger, The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1992) ; Agnes Heller, Can Modernity Survive? (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) ; Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society: New Theories of the Contemporary World (Oxford, UK - Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995) ; David Lyon, Postmodernity (Buchingam: Open University Press, 1994) ; Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism (London-New York: Routlege, 1994) ; Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Barbarian Temperament: Toward a Postmodern Critical Theory (London: Routlege, 1993) ; Bryan S. Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism (London: Routlege, 1994) This discussion of terms and its syntax used is summarized in Frederic Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays (1971-1986), Vol. 2: Syntax of History, 178-208: 195. The randomness of my choice is not a sign of any lack of a systematic research related to this project, but rather the choice of a fair and well-suited illustration

2 3

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of the arbitrariness of naming and understanding Central Europe, an arbitrariness present in almost all the published work on a region that is extremely hard to recognize, locate, define, or even properly name. 6 Egon Schwarz, What Central Europe Is and What It Is Not, In Search of Central Europe, eds. George Sch`pflin and Nancy Wood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989) 143-156. The traditional view of the narratives and individual involvement still alive in Central Europe is not an inherently Central European phenomenon, since it has been adopted throughout the West at least. For instance, such a conservative and outdated belief was also evident in Saul Bellows paper presented at the 1992 conference Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe, held at Rutgers University on April 9, 10, and 11, 1992. I cite: I think we should distinguish between writers and intellectuals. Its an important distinction which deserves to be made, and we should all think very seriously about this. In modern times, we have in a way been in the hands of intellectuals, not necessarily writers. They have formed the major projects of modern times. Intellectuals like Marx, Rousseau, Lenin, and so on down the line, presented us with transformations which we had to live with and which not only dominated our lives but formed our minds, so to speak, so that it required a considerable private individual effort to cast off this framework imposed on us... it is important to distinguish here between those intellectuals who had a formative influence upon politics and society over the last two or three centuries and those who, like the writers, simply tried to follow subjectively, in the realm of feeling, who tried to ascertain what our states of being were Partisan Review LIX. 4 (1992): 530-539. Perhaps the best example to illustrate such a game between the historical obligation of a colonizer and the obligatory history imposed on the colonized is the tragi-comic destiny of Jaroslav Haseks Good Soldier Svejk. The historical obligation imagined by the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph had driven the Austrian police in a Prague pub in which they found an unassuming semi-retarded civilian, Josef Svejk, who after history came to him in a form of an omniscient police-informant, was arrested, and by virtue of the historical mission imagined by Austro-Hungary became a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian infantry. History visited Svejk and became obligatory. The notion of the obligatory history superimposed on individuals in the dual monarchy is analyzed below in the section entitled: History Comes to You: Kafka, Svejk, and the Butchers wife. Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities is one of the only cases where postcolonial theory addresses a Central European culture, using the example of Hungary.

10 Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Editors Introduction: Multiplying Identities, Critical Inquiry 18,4. (Summer 1992): 625-629. 11 Katie Trumpener, The Time of the Gypsies: A People without History in the Narratives of the West, Critical Inquiry 18,4. (Summer 1992): 843-884.

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12 For an elaborated account on the connection between individual psychologies, social psychoanalysis and history as a superimposed modifier of selves in a postmodern conditions, see, James M. Glan, Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Also for an account on similar dynamics of Central European decolonization in the Postcommunist world, see: Stjepan Gabriel Mestrovic, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism (London, New York: Routlege, 1994). 13 Such terminology is repeatedly employed in the Western European (particularly British) media as well as in the public discourse of the United States of America. Interestingly enough, in both cases, medieval means bloodthirsty, uncivilized, untamed (often untamable), and wild. Apart from the fact that the war in Bosnia and Croatia has nothing to do with the media-fabricated concept of medieval tribal hatred, it reveals the Wests deeply-rooted colonial treatment of remote lands on behalf of those who wish to deny their own responsibility in exterminating natives either in the lands they settled (USA) or in those enslaved for their economic greed (GB). Such arrogant treatment tells more about the colonizers than the colonized, because in all cases, it addresses their own crimes. 14 The Second Wheatland Conference on Literature (Lisbon,1990) brought together writers from various countries (predominantly from Russia and Central Europe) who discussed concerns in their literatures within the new developments in Europe. Although it was not planned in the program, the issue of Central Europe became the central topic of often seriously polarized discussion among the Central European and Russian writers who attended. The Lisbon Conference is considered a turning point in bringing Central Europe in the mainstream discursive space of contemporary analysis of European literature. The writers who participated in the conference were, Jan Blonski (Poland), Peter Esterhazi (Hungary), Ismael Kadare (Albania), Danilo Kis (Yugoslavia), George Konrad (Hungary), Ivan Lalic (Yugoslavia), Krzysztof Michalski (Poland), Czeslaw Milosz (Poland), Josef Skvorecky (Czechoslovakia), Jan Jzef Szczepanski (Poland), Veno Taufer (Yugoslavia), Adam Zagajewski (Poland), Lev Anninsky (USSR), Joseph Brodsky (USSR), Sergei Dovlatov (USSR), Anatoly Kim (USSR), Grant Matevosian (USSR), Tatyana Tolstaya (USSR), and Zinovy Zinik (USSR). All the sessions were moderated by Michael Scammell (UK). Other participants were: Hans Christoph Buch (W. Germany), Roberto Calasso (Italy), Pietro Citati (Italy), Ian McEwan (UK), Klaus Rifbjerg (Denmark), Salman Rushdie (India), Susan Sontag (USA), and Derek Walcott (West Indies). The transcript of the roundtable discussion is published in a yearbook of Central European Culture entitled Cross Currents (9-1990) 75-124. 15 Ivo Banac, Milan Kundera i povratak Srednje Europe, Gordogan 19-20 (1985): 39-46.

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16 For a systematic outline of the Frankfurt School treatment of totality see, Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lucks to Habermas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California Press, 1984); also: Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-50 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973) 17 For a detailed discussion of minor literature see: Giles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986). 18 For more on deterritorialization see Giles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987), and Giles Deleuze, and FJlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lone (New York: Viking Press, 1977). 19 For a precise analysis of the role of the obligatory history and the prohibited freedom in Good Soldier Svejk, see Lubomir Dolezel, The Road of History and the Detours of the Good Soldier, Language and Literary Theory, eds. Benjamin A. Stolz, I. R. Titunik, and Lubomir Dolezel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984) 241-249. In the same collection of essays, see also Hana Arie Gaifman, Svejk-The Homo Ludens, 307-323, and Marketa Goetz-Stankiewicz, Kafka and Hasek-Reflections on a Meeting in the House of Fiction, 339-355. 20 This escapade happened during Svejks transport to eke Budjeovice where he was sent by the Imperial army. However, approximately five minutes after the train arrived to Tabor, for some mysterious reason, it was stopped and the alarm handle was released. Once Svejk finally arrived in Tabor, he started drinking and missed all the trains to eke Budjeovice. Infuriated with the situation, the lieutenant ordered him to walk there. Instead of walking in the direction of eke Budjeovice, Svejk took a long trip, almost walking in circles, and reaching his destination much too late. During his escapade many things happened to the good soldier: he was helped by a motherly old woman, taken for a deserter by a farmer, arrested by the gendarmerie and mistaken for a Russian spy...finally he was excorted to Pasek by the corporal, and put on a train to eke Budjeovice. In this picaresque part of the novel, Hasek epitomized Central Europeans sense of historical and individual loss, a sense taken with a fatalistic sense of humor. 21 Hinter-national is a term which belongs to the Prague writer Johannes Urzidil, and signifies a world hinterbehind the nationsa mix in which on some level it looked as if one did not know to which nation he or she belonged in a multi-ethnic and multi-national context. 22 Endre Bojtar, Eastern or Central Europe, Cross Currents 7 (1988): 255-269. 23 Perhaps the best novel that uncovers an everyday life of a Russian everyman and is written under the strong influence of Haseks The Good Soldier Svejk is

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Vladimir Voinovichs The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin. 24 The powerless peoples of Central Europe are not entirely deprived of their role in the active regional history. For a suggestive account on the powerless as a possible agency of social, cultural, and political change in Central Europe, see Vaclav Havels essay The Power of The Powerless, in Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth. (London: Faber and Faber, 1990) 36-122. 25 Although the Lisbon Conference was not the only one to discuss Central Europe as an independent geopolitical and cultural entity, it was the most important one for addressing the issue of colonialism and postcolonialism in the regional politics. For another important conference, see Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe, April 9-11, 1992, Partisan Review LIX-4 (1992).

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Chapter 2: Six Characters In Search of the Danube

So that one does not face the same surprise Kundera experienced being intercepted by the foreign tanks, or repeat Svejks silent performative irony. Taking up the challenge of finding the metaphor, that can express ones own experience of the everyday life of that region, Claudio Magris writes a book about the region organized around a river: The book describes the journey of three couples, former schoolmates, who follow the Danube from its sources in the Black Mountains to the Black Sea. Their experience is narrated by a polyphony of voices, who use the trip along the banks of the river as their main motivation for constructing the narrative. The organizing voice in telling a story about the journey, Magris own, recreates the spiritual reality of the Danubian basin through this sextet, and offers his own historiographic and aesthetic outlook on the protean region. Aware of the background of the historiography of a colonial Central Europe, Magris authorial voice follows the metaphor of the regions main river to build a discursive space in the novel which shows how this metaphor expresses the main tensions in the broader body of Central European culture. As he follows the river from its source(s) to its estuary, Magris offers a tableaux of possible realities offered in the past by various constructs of Central Europe. In so doing he recounts and deconstructs these master narratives of history and culture. Following his travels, the reader is brought to investigate the historiographical and narratological consequences of
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these constructs, and to determine what kind(s) of geopolitical identity may be depicted in them. One of the possible implications of the authors intentions is to provoke his Central European audience to react to these geopolitical narratives imposed from outside the Central European space. Somewhat like Svejk, Magris performs a specific function in Central Europe: by taking on the role of a picaro, a key figure in Western literary tradition. By undertaking this journey in a context of postmodern questioning rather than colonial reality construction, the latter wishes to claim the kind of voice that, for obvious reasons, Haseks Svejk never couldto assert his own existence as a postcolonial Central European intellectual, on a real map, with real historical implications. Unlike Svejk who, trapped in the role of a colonial subject systematically annihilates the colonizers reality by perpetually bringing it to the level of absurdity, Claudio the Pilgrim construes his narrative while following the unpredictable river, which he treats as a traveler-nomad whose guide is his curiosity in a fragmented word of post-subjectivism. His deterritorialized position of a de-centered traveler-nomad enables Magris to assume an active role of a Central European intellectual with his own historical rights and dutiesaware that one cannot define present without regaining the past (Kafka). Magris Danubio is based on his realization that Central Europes reality has been permanently based on the inequality of cultural representation involved in the contest for political authority within the modern world order (Redrawing the Boundaries 437). Engaged in the battle for an adequate representation and cultural space, Magris is also trying to show what else is at stake in the Central Europe through which his Danube, temporally and spatially, flows. He is arguing that Central Europes consciousness needs to be postmodern if the individuals who live there are to overcome the superimposed reality of the modern power blocks which have now been broken up and claim some sort of agency in writing their own histories. The journey down the Danube, in spite of the assumed clarity of the term colonization in its Anglophone or Frankophone contexts, reveals the abundance of different modes of colonial presences within Central European native lands and shows the variety of
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different, but equally plural and flexible subject positions that the varied colonialisms have produced in the textual testimonies from countries such as Austria, Italy, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia, and the likethemselves also never officially recognized as colonies. Magris novel Danubio can be taken strategically, as a travel guide and map that directs its readers to the realization that Central European identity is not ou-topos, but very real and plural entity, offering a polyphony of non-hierachized identities rather than a single holistic identity of the colonized.

Dening the River

The Poetics of a Classical Exemplar Magris first approach to Central Europe is philosophical. In his textual search, the author simultaneously travels along the Danube and time travels into the metaphors that reside within the history of philosophy, hoping to encounter a model for the river. Aware of the impossibility of establishing a firm historical contour for the region, Magris introduces an old Western metaphor, Heraclitus image of a river as an entity in its eternal change,1 a piece of old wisdom stressing how utopian and vain is the human desire to comprehend flux. According to Heraclitus, regardless of how many times individuals step in the river, they can never grasp the nature of their position because the river is always new. Yet Magris is torn between the dialectic dynamic of this metaphor2 and his own Western human desire for the security of scientific analysis -- the desire to achieve results which may definitively codify the labyrinths of a single existence. To resolve this tension, so familiar to the socio-political dynamics of Central Europe, Magris embraces both dimensions of the river metaphor. This choice is based on a more intuitive and certainly more literary reading of Heraclitus -- on the hope that a river can be stopped. Once it is held up, the body of water behaves like those particles and atoms of which Zenos arrow3 is composed, and whose configuration may be seen as permanently static. By employ91

ing these two readings of Heraclitus, Magris hopes to isolate and freeze the Danubes ever-changing history in order to find out what each may imply as historically-determined geocultural narratives. Thus Magris experiment has its roots in the Western tradition of science. His description of the river reflects the proper scientific method accepted by Western intellectuals. According to Zeno, once an arrow is discharged, its essence nonetheless remains fixed because all the elements that compose it are essentially static. Thus the arrows atoms in their interrelation do not move, and so, regardless of an objects motion, its wooden fabric remains undisturbed. Consequently, its movement is only an appearance, therefore unreal, fictitious. To distinguish between an objects invisible essence and its real appearance, then, one must only refer to the solidity of those atomic particles. This is an illustration of how the traditional West determines identity -- by asking what it is, rather than, like in Kunderas case, how it feels. Following Zenos aporia more in the realm of the imagination than as traditional metaphysics, Magris goal is to liberate his own fantasy about the river metaphor, looking for new solutions to the definition of the Danube -- one which could ultimately reconcile those two metonymycal polarities. If wood is wood, thinks Magris, then water is waterand maybe Heraclitus was wrong in saying that no one can comprehend flux? Perhaps Heraclitus fragment has to be re-formulated in a third way, if it is to illustrate the dynamism of the Danubes fluctuating reality. Perhaps the fragment should state: Regardless of how many times one steps in the same river, the river is always essentially the same. This restatement leads Magris to a redefinition of the Danubes landscapes and its changing histories as truths which cannot be grasped universally, but only in relation to all those particles of difference, represented in various occupying powers and historical imperatives, that a traveler will encounter when following the rivers currents. The poetics of Magris travel book will, in consequence, be romantic in intent, yet still nostalgic vis--vis the literary traditions of the West, and so will need such metaphysical encouragement and confirmation from ancient thinkers. Despite his respect for the literary past, however, the author cannot be satisfied with his simpler
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appropriations of Heraclitus definitions of a river because these two incompatible concepts create two polarities that do not correspond with Magris paradigmatic experiment of Central Europe, which is always the same (personally) but always different (politically). Magris new definition therefore stresses the literary (and thus fictional) structure of his intention to reframe and question the wastelands of Central European historiography, poetics and politics seen as part and parcel of the same body of water translated into metaphors that have designated the Danube and Central Europe definable from within its inherent regional qualities. The cultural iconography of western modernism has followed the pattern of its science, stressing the essential wholeness of entities under their varied perceptions. Yet such wholeness seems contradictory to the fluctuating and merging semiotics of the Danube that Magris, as a Central European, has experienced. In consequence, both the methods and results of Magris literary journey speak to postmodern and anti-essentialist perspectives, questioning the Wests traditional metaphors just as Kundera questioned the role of intellectuals emotions in the presence of tanks that came to Central Europe from the East. Magris dilemma regarding the two different possible interpretations of Heraclitus does not lead him to either of the poles of the binary. Magris hesitates to offer a clear exegesis of the river-as-fragment in order not to coin it in a Western way. Instead, he embraces the infinite variety of the metaphors flow, while exploring the stability of moments in its historical existence. His solution embraces both possible readings of the river metaphor. While striving to define the Danube, Magris, as an active traveler, thus tries to make peace between western poetics and the po-et(h)ics of a postcolonial world between metaphors and poetic references seen as tools of representation. He demonstrates his respect for the artists internal sense of the pragmatic poetic justice which the topic deserves. His clear intent is to remain consistent and faithful to the topography of Central Europe, even if it has not yet been aesthetically codified. Within the Western tradition, Heraclitus and Zenos aphorisms seem to be crucial for understanding the meanings of the narrative that Magris uses to frame central theoreti93

cal and methodological questions that govern the intentional level of Danubio. Their ontologies (stressing the solidity under appearances) have been widely exploited in modernism, and they have been translated into the idiom of more contemporary post-modern epistemology. In the postmodern framing which Magris acknowledges just as he does modernism, however these aphorisms will now read: an identity in its simplest meaning is defined not simply out of its own essence, but also in relation to others. The West wants to read metaphors essentially; Kunderas East, affectively. Magris brings the two extremes together by organizing and destabilizing the epistemological and affective truths of his dominant metaphor, the Danube. In so doing, he grounds the discussion of Central Europe in newly appropriated terms as well. His attempt to maintain a commitment to both essential and relational definitions of identity also splits Claudio Magris as narrator. Conflicts in definition each need their own speaker, their own fictional model for experience. As Professor Claudio Magris, he is a representative of a strictly-defined Western poetics and critic of literary reference, but this strict role is alien to Magris the pilgrim, whose Virgil offers various narratives that are too protean to be of any help,4 since there are too many different landscapes to allow a straightforward narrative resolution of the rivers geocultural identity; nonetheless, Magris admiration for the modernist and traditional master narratives of his own national literature finds its place in the novels ideological narrative frame. Like Dante in his La divina commedia, Magris had divided his authorial voice. Instead of speaking as two voices whose hierarchical interrelations are relatively stable as narrative topoi or tropes (Dante the author and Dante the pilgrim); however, Magris splits his narrative voice in new ways to liberate himself from clear identification, to make himself and his readers into travelers, into pilgrims whose ability to define themselves and the region grows as the journey develops. The relation between Magris the author and Magris the traveler thus directly alludes to that between Dante the poet and Dante the pilgrim in La Commedia, while moving beyond Dantes belief in narrative as a single truth. In Dantes case, the knowledge gained by the two pilgrims targets and
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reveals a hierarchical truth; while in Magris work, the knowledge of the narrators is conclusive only as an inductive aggregate of individually interpreted facts encountered in the course of their wanderings. This seemingly clear distinction between the two narrative voices in Danubio thus also illustrates not only the arbitrariness of this search for the identity of the Danube, but also the negotiability of Magris choice of two (or more) different readings of the river metaphor. Magris attempts to sustain both of the models, but, due to the topics structure, ends up questioning both. Heraclitus speaks of eternal movement; Zeno (Parmenides), of eternal rest. Recovered as potentially equal authorities on the philosophy of nature, they offer Magris two competing models of the essence of his river metaphoractivity vs. inactivity. In order to understand the narrative implications of Magris choice for the rivers definition, it is useful to inquire exactly how a metaphor corresponds with a narrative reality. Can Zenos idea, for instance, be seen as a justification for an essentialist narrative point of view, or for a relational one? Yet isnt such an essentialist definition of an object still relational when that strategy is defined as the relational stillness of its particles? That is, should one define an object by describing what it intrinsically is, or can an object be defined by defining the relationships into which it enters? Or is Heraclitus aphorism perhaps more suitable for a narrative defining a rivers identity, since it is based on a model of flux whose essence (if any) is always relational, never fixed? In this case, an essence is also established through an essential absence: the water, defined spatially, is no longer there. In other words, can one narrate or define something that has always disappeared from the horizon? In other words, Danubio is a narrative that seeks to define something that does not exist as a traditionally/positively definable referent. A river has banks and a streambed, so it has limits and borders, but its core, the water, is never a steady referent point. Yet why does a narrative explaining something in flux like the Danube, have to be based on words or signs that have a discrete, fixed existence or reference? Why would a definition of the Danube have to refer to the essences of things? By using the aforementioned aporiae as a nar95

rative strategy, Magris reveals his awareness of how geohistorical reality is fictionalized. For these cases, moreover, he is arguing for a metonymic textual strategy that can reflect a non-essentialist and non-essentializing image of the objective world. As a part of such an explanation, Magris poetics also provides anti-essentialist grounds of his forthcoming po-et(h)ical analysis of the Danubian reality. This narrative strategy is pragmatic, because it defines identities relationally, rather than as permanent essences. This strategy for definition is necessary when the reference points against which defined subjects are imposed upon a fluid political and geographical situation, as is the case of Central Europe. Moreover, what if those colonized others do not have any constituent reference point against which to define themselves? And this is what is precisely at stake in Central Europe: its inhabitants have nothing to define themselves against, except the officially imposed historical master narratives generated in the workshops of the various colonizers. As Magris has noted, the Danubian landscape, known mainly to the outside world through fictionalized representations of its own historical reality, is constantly shifting. The landscapes reality has had polyvalent and extrinsically imposed political and intellectual identities since the time of the Romans. In one sense, then, this colonial polyphony is an empirical proof of such regional fictionality. This fictionality, however, is not an ontic dimension of Central Europe; instead, Central Europe has almost always seemed fictional to its inhabitants because of the colonial dynamics of conquest and possession, due to which the region has never belonged to its own peoples. Its actual existence has therefore seemed fictional to the ethnicities whose land it really is. It has been constantly in the hands of strangers -- of powerful agencies alien to its geography; nonetheless, the regions fictional identity still exerts influence on the identities of its inhabitants, as Kunderas experience confirms it. It also affects the ways in which these identities were constructed or otherwise called into existence. The tragedy of Central Europe can easily be summarized in one sentence: Central European reality has never been produced indigenously, unrelated to the colonizers histories, but rather in terms of the imperial conquests. The various fluid and
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fictionalized realities of the Danube, produced by such colonialism, together with all the real connotations of its mythical representations, thus actually create its reality (and/or realities) for the individuals who live in this essentially fictional space. But these fictions are not simply in the minds of the regions inhabitants. They exist as the templates for the social, cultural, political, and geographical maps used to negotiate ones courses through the region. Although he is asking a Central European question, Magris novel is nonetheless based on Western narrative model of traditional travel literature, resting on a mainstream view of Central European cultural history, closely attached to colonial narratives. Seen as part of Western scientific traditions, Magris journey can be described in the following terms: an Italian Germanist educated in Torino, who holds a prestigious job at the University of Trieste, follows the well-known Danubian colonial paths from the West to the East, from the North to the South; however, the author does not behave as a colonial traveler. On the contrary: he is unable (or unwilling) to decide on even a single definition on what he offers a view. Because his poetics is po-et[h]ical, he refuses to impose his colonizing vision onto a space which he is experiencing differently. Expressed more scientifically, he cannot or will not decide between Zenos and Heraclitus definitions of an entity. So instead of defining the Central Europe the topic of his travel book, which written in an essentialist way might read as the authors possible textual conquestMagris follows the metonymy of the river to uncover all the possible narratives which any pre-given definition would suppress. Following the Danube as a narrative organizing principle and expressing both the fluctuations in and continuities among various constructions of Central Europe, Magris narrative thus meanders through history as the actual river does, not as the master narrative. In questioning these master narratives, Magris declines to create a new master narrative which would objectify the topic and adjust it to the traditional modes of colonial travelogues. Danubio is thus not only a piece of travel literature that circumscribes or represents the regions various identities; it is also a faithful, po-et[h]ical narrative recreation of the unstable historical identities encountered in Danu97

bian lands. In other words, Magris poetics is ethical because it honestly reflects the Danubian flux rather than insisting on its externally proclaimed stability. His novel is a narrative re-creation of the unstable and de-centered historical identities whose poet(h)ics is indeed based on ethics that insists on an internal, contextual, locallygrounded approach in re-inventing Central Europe. And it is clear from Danubio that such a re-creation has to be done from within from the very object of discussion. Claudio Magris knows that the idea of the Danubes stability is external to the region, and, as such, colonial. Therefore he simply refuses to impose the dominant Western conventions of experience onto someone elses experiences of reality. He prefers a polyphony of personal experiences instead.

The importance of a Journey I

Travelers Early in his novel, Magris builds his ethical position into his narrative. He quotes Otto Weininger, a famous source for a variety of the regions historical narratives whose outlook on traveling is rather holistic: A river has no totality -- traveling is immoral.5 Weiningers statement easily refers to Magris own experience of a fragmented river whose flux contradicts the imagined holism of ones individual existence. Chasing a river on a journey, in Weiningers view, means a genuine betrayal of human essence because one is emphasizing change rather than exploring a core self. As Danubio opens, however, Magris is confronting the immorality of such travel in his own (Heraclitian) way when he receives an invitation to participate in an exhibition6 on The Architecture of the Journey: The History and Utopia of Hotels.7 Initially, the idea that a journey has an architecture sounds comforting to him. It suggests that, at least in memory, a traveler can re-member all the individual elements of a trip and assemble them into a certain system of coherent experiences, into a narrative defining a certain phase of an individuals life. However, the subtitle
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of the exhibition points out another level of immorality in which a journey can be implicated in: The History and Utopia of Hotels. This immorality of leisure is of lesser importance for the idea of the journey, since it principally has to do with travelers -- with their ideas of rest. Yet it again reflects how this conferences implicit master narrative anchors itself in essences and fixed objects, not a change. Disturbed by the thought of the architecture of a journey as a stable object that desires to restore yet another set of master-narratives built around essentialist notions of rest, rather than as a shifting pattern of an individuals experience, Magris refuses to visit that exhibition. Instead, he decided to undertake a journey himself and record it in a different kind of fictionalized testimony. Nevertheless, at its basis, Magris journey still has a literary topography within its divided narrative whose classical counterpart is to be found in Dante Alighieris trip through the triadic Christian construct of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise. The narrative authority of Dante the pilgrim still structures the historical form of Magris individual experiences just as rigidly as a hotel objectifies a traveler. Seen through the eyes of a narratologist, the stance of such a narrator is thus paradoxical as Magris choice of avenues through which to question master narratives: he plays with authorities inside and outside the text who are confessing their reactions and thoughts in various historical terms. Such internal narrators are confessional references which create the impression of subjectivity within the objective form of the narrative. Magris textually and culturally subversive modes are peculiar because more than once they depend on a stable subject-position usually taken from his own national literature. While he reaches in the past invoking doubles such as Dante, he parodies the very idea of narrative topoi-icons by multiplying his own focalization separating/connecting it in six subject-positions who, all of them, communicate either by reminiscing (whenever they speak of time or actively relate to it) or in a confessional mode (whenever they speak of or relate to space) thus producing a plurality of meanings. Such internally focalized voices produce confessional references whose collective subjectivity results in an objective reality of the novel. They move the plot forward within the text, but they also always narrate the
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world that already contains them. Their introspection is both objective (in relation to the narrated object) and subjective (in their personal communication). Such deconstruction of binary oppositions suggests the nonexistence of firmly defined boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity of the topicthe Danube, and exemplifies Magris textual poet(h)ics. Being a part of their narrated world, such narrator-characters narrate everything that does not narrate itself. To avoid the question of who narrates them, they must take control, multiply themselves and send their complementary doubles off on journeys. Characters must multiply until the main focal point, the imagined bearer of narrative stability disintegrates and in his dis-integration produces an effective narrative structure whose elementary narrative units are doppelgngers. Such complementary doubles, although constantly within a reach, never meet each other in any shape other than that of a functional narrative unit. Therefore Dante the pilgrim follows first Virgil and later Beatrice whose celestial being enables communication within the imaginative. For the same reason Claudio Magris multiplies his voice and fictionalizes his own world in order to testify about the multiple narrative architectures which can be imposed upon the experiences of his real journey. By multiplying personae, he offers various perspectives on the historical realities of Central Europe, and exemplifies the various kinds of subjectivity that can be produced within those official narratives of history. Although in its beginning Danubio seems to be a travelogue, it has its guides built inthrough a considerably less stable way than Dante. It is a novel which allows the reader to follow the six characters who travel the Danube on its/their way from the Schwartzwald to the Black Sea. A reliable but still partial narrator, Claudio the Pilgrim, offers additional meditations based upon the movement of that large body of water. Although, unlike Dante the pilgrim, Claudio the pilgrim has no preconceived truth to grasp through a quasi-inductive way of collecting empirical data, his cognitive method parallels that of Dantes. Claudios knowledge, like Dante the pilgrims, grows with the flow of the river. The fragmentation of the world, so immoral to Weininger, seems completely natural to Magris. It is a constitutive element of his narrative world, a set of loose100

ly-connected fragments, each offered in another voice for the reader to consider from outside the novels fictional space. Comparing the six different personal histories incorporated in Magris rereading of the official Central European historical narrative, it is unclear which figure, if any, can claim the authenticity of their report. This narrative move, Magris reaction to an invitation, is spontaneously postmodern, even though it has been generated in a literature professors nostalgia about the monolithic and hierarchical iconography of European modernism. He remembers Dante and his Doppelgnger, but when it comes to writing his own book, Magris does not hesitate to line up his ideas in a more contemporary, non-hierarchical catalogue, dividing his voice into more voices, whose authority claims, unlike Dantes, are each unclear. His nostalgia is still evident in the meta-textual tributes he pays to his literary predecessors. As the river goes by, Magris recalls his literary exemplars as cultural icons related to the Danubian landscape. Magris acknowledgment of those narrative exemplars pays tribute to the legacies of his own thought, as well as to the diachronic coherence of his narrative voice. He does not, however, make the axiologiclal mistake of deciding which one is better than any other. He pays his tribute to the various histories of the region in various ways. Sometimes the narrator just mentions some of the great writers from a polite distance, with respect: In this world administered and organized on a planetary scale, to be sure, the adventure and mystery of travel would seem to be dead and done for: even Baudelaires Voyagers, who set out to look for the unheard-of and were ready to face shipwreck in the attempt, found in the unknown, and in spite of every unforeseen disaster, precisely the same tedium that they left at home. (Danube15)*
* Certo, nel mondo amministrato e organizzato su scala planetaria lavventura e il mistero del viaggio sembrano finiti; gi i viaggiatori di Baudelaire, partiti alla ricerca dellinaudito e pronti a naufragare in questa sortita, trovano nellignoto, nonostante ogni disastro imprevisto, lo stesso tedio lasciato a casa. (Danubio 12)

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Magris polite aside clearly identifies Baudelaires high-culture definition of a journey as significant to his own: he too discovers that all journeys are tedious. His reference introduces the atmosphere and inner security of a literary milieu that Magris wants his readers to consider as relevant to the definition of the river. Magris tries to be both aesthetic and comprehensive: he needs to acknowledge the authority of past masters in constructing the subjective experiences of his realities. Through such references, the distance between Magris and the great writers of the past decreases. Such a nostalgic gesture gradually comforts Magris desire to remain, at least spiritually, within the historical traditions of Modernism. In a similar vein, other mainstream writers are introduced in a more relaxed way, almost as Magris peers, dedicated to the same cause. Like Baudelaire, Gottfried Benn, a German poet, is nonchalantly implicated in Magris prose: Vain fancies, says Benn, even when one feels the pitiless azure break open beneath a debatable reality. (Danube 16)* This is definitely an invocation of a high poetic register that characterizes the river as art, as a source of infinity. In some, more rigid cases, when Claudio the pilgrim cannot escape the influence of Magris the professor, other authorities are cited in a tone of more scholarly pedantry: In the same way the project drawn up by these two effusive scholars, set out like Wittgensteins Tractatus (1.1, 1.2, 2.11, 2.12 etc.) . . . (Danube 17)**

Velleit, diceva Benn, anche quando si sente lo spietato azzurro spalancarsi sotto lopinabile realt. (Danubio 12) ** Cos lo schema del progetto [Larchitectura del viaggio; storia ed utopia degli albergi ]dei due espansivi studiosi, articolato come il Tractatus di Wittgenstein (1.1, 1.2, 2.11, 2.12 ecc.) . . . (Danubio 13)

By introducing the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in this way, Magris leaves the impression of an oxymorona paradoxical mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-parody that calls narrative authority into question. The contrast between these various registers signals the chaotic nature of Magris fictional reality as well as the polyphony of the narrative voices. It emphasizes Magris de-hierarchized attempts to imitate the randomness of waters as they gather in Danubian gutters, his attempt to break old, fixed power relations. Significantly, all the master narratives acknowledged by Magris are not from high culture or official science (as the Weininger example has already suggested). To continue his questions of traditional narratives, Magris mentions other, less established intellectuals with great precision: Like Flaubert or Proust, Neweklowsky devoted his entire existence to the work, to writing, to The Book. The result is a work in three volumes, a total of 2,164 pages (including illustrations), which weighs 5.9 kilos and which, as stated in the title, deals not with the Danube as such, but more modestly with Navigation and Rafting on the Upper Danube (1952-1964). (Danube 59)* There is a certain parallelism between those four authors (Baudelaire, Benn, Wittgenstein, and the pedant Neweklowsky) and the six characters who follow the river in Magris narrative. Like these four writers, the six characters seem to relate simply, spontaneously. Their voices are not intended to produce any kind of harmony, but rather to introduce a chaotic set of various fragments based on their shared art of memory. The collective memories of the former classmates and Magris narrative personae (Amedeo, Maddalena, Gigi,
* Come Flaubert o Proust, Neweklowsky ha dedicato la sua intera siztenza allopera, alla scrittura, al libro; il risultato un volume in tre tomi di 2164 pagine complessive, comprese le illustrazioni, che pesa cinque chili e novecento grammi e che, come dice il titolo, affronta non il Danubio, ma, pi modestamente, La navigazione e la fluitazione nel Danubio Superiore (1952-1964). (Danubio 66)

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Francesca, Claudio and Maria Giuditta) are as essentially different as their personal experiences. Only their nostalgic appeal to master narratives re-members their essentially dismembered personal histories that cohere for the readers, so that they can bring their individual and subjective idealisms into some fixed classifications and allow the reader to compare the results of their various journeys through the fluctuating and ever-fleeting landscapes of their shared Danubian reality. The chaos that determines their scattered references is reflected in another intentional element of Magris narrative structurehis devotion to the equally chaotic polyphony of Baudelaire, Benn, Wittgenstein and Neweklowsky. No matter how seriously one tries to codify the landscape of the diverse region through which the Danube flows, chaos is the only possible uniting framework for their references, just as it is for the polyphony of Magris fictional clones. The fictional travelers have a single shared reference: their source, the author. The only reality that logically keeps the chaotic particles of the two parallel sets of authors together (either fictional [Amedeo, Gigi, Maddalena, Claudio, Maria Giuditta, Francesca] or fictionalized [Baudelaire, Benn, Wittgenstein, Neweklowsky]) is their connection with another referent -- Magris. As author of a narrative, Magris occupies the position of a modernist, as a creator of his own, closed, fictional world. Yet, as a Central European, his personal experience is more fragmented, less able to be expressed without reference to the kind of narrative schizophrenia that all these various authorities from inside and outside the text represent. Magris polite and worldly manners, clearly noticeable in his addressing the panoply of voices in respectful tones, place him squarely among them as fictional, yet also define him as a product of the hierarchical melancholy of his region. His narrative manners ultimately must remain free of any such strict references to the traditions of modernist literature which would preserve an underlying, extra-textual coherence for the text itself. Magris is not positing these multiple voices as his straight alter-egos, or as reflections of his subjective experience. On the contrary, the connection between the references in the text and the referent outside of it is not
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referential in traditional terms: it is not adequatio intellectus (or verbis) et rei, but rather reflects only a relation of contiguity and coherence, in which statements remain true as long as they do not contradict themselves in the realm of syntax.8 The pragmatic function and rhetoric of such prose narratives do not define themselves as reflecting the verisimilitude or truth of Magris own narrative position, nor do they value the concept of truth as an effect of so-called artistic authenticity but rather cohere with an initial textual reality of a particular narrative structure. Consequently, on a larger scale, the reality/coherence of Magris text in its entirety operates on the level of a discourse: his narrative truth is the effect of his authorial sincerity in choosing modes of representation and putting it in concordance with his authorial intentions. The reality of Magris text, whose truthfulness resides within a multi-layered coherence of utterances, appears and operates as a world-making process which is contained in the discursive reality of the river. In such a discursive reality the Danube is not just a material reference; it is rather a postmodern structure (polysemic, dehierarchized, decentered) that simultaneously enables and produces a mimetic space needed for truth-production. The morality of possible contradictions between these various speakers is therefore of no importance for Claudio the Pilgrim. He inscribes his own narrative syntax into a non-referential, non-essentialist world. Although any general reference to Central Europe may have initially suggested the nobility of a high cultures melancholy attached to a region lost in history, the unanswerability of a single common-sense question (what is Central Europe?) speaks against the regions essentialism. Even though we do not know how to define Central Europe, nothing prevents us from reading, and even writing, meaningful books on the topic. A book on a topic whose existence is based upon absent signifiers proves the efficiency and creativity of writing itself, not the hidden habitat of its absent historical reference or truth. In framing his narrative, Magris is redefining writing not as an act of creation or re-creation, which would be a modernist gesture, but rather as a free play of signifiers whose existence as a postmodern analysis, is textually based and which thus has no need to be
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related to any worldly objects. He cannot represent a real Danube (he has already demonstrated the unavailability of an acceptable metaphor around which to build that kind of narrative); however he can show how various travelers respond to the river, giving it a kind of human reality through their mental representationthrough human knowledge of a phenomenon. In the context of such reality-producing syntax Magris neither has to nor can he represent/describe the real Danubethe Danube the way it is, because, in an essentialist framework the Danube it is not. The Danube communicates with a subject through a polyphony of voices. It echoes contingency, which exists in a subjects consciousness only as a perception whose legend lives despite the referential status of the narrated object. Magris thus builds a multiplicity of narrators voices into a representation of a subjectively-experienced reality which simulates the unavailable objective existence of the river in a more plural, and thus a historically more responsible way than has been done before. The subjective reality of the Danubes history is organized like literature, and therefore is suggestive the way literature is. As in works of fiction, the nature of Danubes reality is narrative; moreover, it has been historically suggestive and plural enough for an entire phenomenological scheme to be built around the collection of the various historical narratives available in this space, a scheme also represented in the collected iconography of Central European museums and catalogues. A poet and novelist as well as an intellectual product of such a cultural and historical context, Magris knows that once such icons are de-hierarchized and removed from their purported real historical and cultural references and hence from a fixed set of relations, they no longer need to appear to refer to any imagined or even desired reality. Instead, they become implicated in the luddic composition of narrative variations whose free fluctuations are convincing enough to make readers accept their continually re-emerging and re-evaluating reality. The river exists in the reality of humanism(s) and humanity. In a phenomenological sense, he truth about the river is defined as the effect of a cognitive method in which an individual sees as real things s/he internalized in the mind of the (traveling) subject alone. The
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polyphony of voices in Danube represents a subjective, empirical truth about a reality that is not one. Such a plural reality of the locally positioned reports about the object/topic simulate negative existence of the objective narrative accounts (the legacy of Modernism) while suggesting the need for a changethe necessity of a paradigm shift. The plurality of locally grounded narratives and testimonies has replaced the universal particularity of all the external stories concerning the Danube. Those individually multiplied narrative utterances engender both suggestibility and credibility of Magris fiction. Danubes plurality, less than twenty years after its publication, in a rather paradoxical way, is the reason why this book already belongs to both the regional iconography of not-yet-dismantled modernist museums, and the global postmodern catalogue of historical and fictional works that in a way make their own canon. The novelty of Magris novel is in its attempted and partially carried out, deconstruction of museums of a yesterdays world (Zweig) whose past can be preserved under one condition only: if an individual begins to think of this worlds past as well as of its presence in terms of areality-in-becomingthe reality whose coming into being depends on the realness and effectiveness of its efforts to destroy the museal hierarchies and re-sort the catalogues of cultural data following the cultural logic(s) of the worlds known to reject uniformity as the dominant model of self-determination.

The importance of a Journey II

The River The polyphony of focal positions along with the plurality of narrative voices eager to re-construct the region obscured by history exemplify geopolitical dynamics of combining literary and literal elements that, within the course of time, made the political as well as cultural reality of the Danubian basin. This plurality clearly and with reason rejects any holistic vision similar to that of Baudelaires voyagers, which caused their universal experience of boredom. Baude107

laires poem as well as Magrisvignette suggests that, after a shipwreck in an unknown land and in spite of their tragedy, the castaways encounter the same tedium they left at home. They are confronted not by forces of nature or by absolute realities, but by their own constructs of reality and by their pre-scripted (and prescriptive) reactions to them. Such individuals reactions will be key in showing that reality is somehow equivalent to the ways in which the immediate environment affects the individuals, to the way in which it is constituted and refracted in their common experiences. Repeating a random fragment politely borrowed from Baudelaire places no demands for totality on Magris or on his fictional alter-egos. The absence of totality in the reality on which they all comment in various ways and voices is neither moral or immoral -it is simply real in a plural region. And, for the traditional traveler, this reality is represented through a state which is seen as negative, as tedium. However, Magris realizes that there is nothing really immoral in boredom. It is simply the existential condition which can accompany travelers wherever they are. Not because they travel, but because they are human. Baudelaires travelers encounter a reflection of incompleteness of their personal identities in the unknown. Their preconceived cultural code brings them too in their journey. Baudellaire calls such inability to adapt to the spaces of others, boredom. Their obviously uprooted selves lose themselves in boredom. Magris intellectual tourists also become aware of their incompleteness. Their lack of imagined finality they feel in the mutual sense of loss of their individual pasts, in their shared need to excavate that same past and rescue it from the oblivion. They feel they cannot re-capture their own past without resuscitating the contents of the region usually referred to as the former entity. Where Weininger had lamented the absence of totality in a river, Magris does not seem to be bothered with the intellectual accusation of the river claiming that it has no totality. On the contrary, he even characterizes his river by reference to an existential condition which, like the river, crosses all borders, following individual travelers -- to tedium, a condition which fundamentally characterizes the Danubes historical reality-as-perception whenever those per108

ceptions are governed by a stable master narrative. Magris temporarily embraces Baudelaires ideas and manipulates it into a question: if boredom is the only positive (extant) category of human experience that survives a journey, what reality does this journey represent? Or, if this question sounds too difficult to be answered, one can easily rephrase it asking: what is the point of lamenting the absence of totality, if that totality only produces tedium for humans? Why even trying to look beyond the experience of tedium to define reality, when that tedium is the only reality that any traveler experiences? The totalizing move of a high modernist narrative like that such as Baudellaires, levels all human experience, and, on a esthetic level resembles the grand narratives of political domination. To restore contours to human experience while decolonizing the subjects, Magris must embrace the postmodern conditiona plurality of narrative modes which, by rejecting totalizing gestures, emphasize the uniqueness and realness of an individual experience. Such uniqueness and realness are necessary in what Kafka refers to when he speaks about the collective and individual past of all the underrepresented groups that needs to be regained. Magris river is thus much more complex than Weiningers. After superficially reading Plato and Hegel, Weininger had demanded an underlying totality that would make sense of travel and guarantee the integrity of human experience. Magris, however builds another river of experience. Along with organizing his narrative sextet into a novels structure, Magris insists on seeing the world as a discourse phenomenon. He repeatedly stresses how the world is only a text that can be read in various ways for various purposesall of them equally moral or immoral. On a journey like his, the whole Danube cannot possibly be found; nor can Magris great thinkers reveal the truth of the world as a set of aesthetic, philosophical, or scientific values. At best, the traveler can only pay the tribute to those great thinkers who accompany him on his journey and realize that there is always more of the same to see and that the experience of the river is the only definition of everything that anyone who travels will ever encounter.
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The fact that the tedium of existence continues in every fictional or real space points to the conclusion that, in this Western tradition, to travel equals to be. The traveler is experiencing his or her being-in-the-world, but has been alerted to it only after it has received its signifier, in this particular context, by reference to Baudelaires metaphor which allows it to be turned into a narrative that inscribes individual experiences. People, travelers, feel tedium wherever they go, but each new encounter with that universal boredom reinforces not only their illusion of knowledge about a present world, but also their illusion of existential loss. Todays traveler moves much faster through different systems of signs. S/he knows that, if s/he wants to apprehend the world, s/he has to continue the journey being very curious, because there is always something new and unseen that makes every journey deprived of its finality. Therefore a traveler needs no definitions of rivers whose banks s/he visits. Therefore a scientist needs no definition of a region in order to experience it. After all, the traditional western worldview favors the concept of the experience of (linear) time and space that structures all the rest of human apprehension understanding time and space as the preconditions for any and all knowledge of human existence. Therefore, in order to rid ourselves of boredom as a spatial category without completely erasing it from the cultural and ideological legacies of Western order of things, let us keep it as a mental souveniras something we recognize all our livessomething that, independently from space, resides in time. Let us grasp that tedium as a signifier of our time, not only in our immediate living space but also in all the spaces we choose to occupy in (our) time. Both time and space are the foundations of our experience, while our experience is crucial in understanding the times of spaces we, either temporarily or permanently inhabit. The reality of the Danubian basin is the reality of its travelers and its inhabitants. In Danubes case it is made of an operative fiction whose truthfulness attempts (once more) to regain the past hidden from its own historical content by a construed, false, and tedious reality of its official histories. We are constantly changing, and all changes in the perceiving individual are measured against the markers of time and space. As the
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landscape changes, so does the traveler, but what that change really is is now marked as a particularly intriguing question, not necessarily an answerable one. To be sure, the travelers sense of self is modified during a trip, but the fact that she9 can recognize tedium as the same as it unfolds through the landscape suggests that there is some coherence in her self. She has agreed to enter into a relationship with the landscape on the terms narrated by history, but the fact that she, although displaced, can still pinpoint her own tedium speaks in favor of her journey as a perfectly acceptable existential condition, and as a perfectly acceptable reference point around which to re-constitute the horizon10 on which her own definition of the river will appear. Rather than assuming that we may understand and follow so-called nature of history, Magris text demonstrates that there is nothing immoral about living in accord with ones own nature. Instead of copying the construed mechanics of usually immoral collective historical experience, we come into being by permanently adjusting ourselves to a fragmented world and defining it in reference to our own selves, not only in reference to other criteria such as art, science, philosophy, or the master narratives of history. This cycle of individual being-in-the-world is obvious from Magris own relation to the aesthetic (Baudelaire), scientific (Neweklowsky) and philosophy (Wittgenstein). For Magris, then, to be in this world also means to accept it in various ways. Each individual destiny of a member of a group, evolving through an experience like travel, nonetheless can help our understanding of the worlds (in)coherence more than any earlier holistic thinkers thirst for radical change of the master historical narratives does. For us to share multiple experiences of the river is also to learn about its definition. Magris narrates the world as seen from the perspective of a postmodern traveler who refuses to see it as a dialectically organized set of opportunities which gradually reveal either the end of history or its fulfillment. Yet Magris thinking is not utopian: utopia belongs to hotels and museums, not to human experience. As a traveler, he prefers the active imagination of an individual asserting a sense of self in the present as an agency which can be revisited and re-membered while he is resting in a hotel room after travel; howev111

er, he is not interested in a future guided by any single narrative because that would turn experience and history into an ou-topos, nowhere to be found on the map. Magris Danubian world is thus itself defined and definable only as a representation, not as an object. His plural narrative incorporates many different types of narratives: poetry, philosophy, geography, history, natural sciences, prose. The plural narrators who represent each of these options as master narratives tend to collapse the distinction between writers, travelers and readers, recasting individual experience as it generates infinite sets of possibilities of personal identity. As a writer who reads as he travels, Magris exemplifies the phenomenological narrative scheme of postmodernism, stressing how plural stories constitute and structure the perceived realities of individuals and groups. In his version, individuals merge their stories in order to recover identities which have been too ambitiously and inflexibly defined in modernism. If the morality of an individual life were understood as a systematically arranged journey (the fear of which perhaps killed Weinenger: not because rivers did not have totality, but because he could not cope with a world that had been deprived of its own finalityin Weinengers, of its mysterious sense, he in verbis, yearned for) then it is irrelevant within the postmodern existential scheme. The scattered representations of reality that occupied his Central Europe in an age of political fragmentation did not appease his metaphysical anger; Weininger could not accept a disjunction between subjective and objective reality. The postmodern traveler sees existence not as a definite historical reality pre-scripted by master narratives, but rather a journey which does not betray life and its day to day particularity. On the contrary, every journey, with its unpredictable reality, actually reflects for Magris the randomness of a singular existence and a precious uniqueness of life. The journey undertaken by Magris six characters is, unlike the agreement signed by the trio in Yalta, not a colonizing mission of any sort. It is an introspective trip that will help readers decolonize their mind as they approach Central Europe. This trip is based on personal close-ups seen through an analytical
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magnifying mirror wherein all the objects, once reflected, are significantly closer then they appear. As Magris himself states: The whole scheme is a first draft of a Statute for Living -- if [it is true that] life is a journey, as they say, and [that] we pass across the face of the earth as guests. (Danube 15)* Seen in such parameters, Danube is thus Magris postmodern narrative response to the postmodern condition of the perpetually-postcolonial Central Europe.

The invisible Danube: the question of Source

Professor Claudio Magris Often immoral in its detachment, the real Danube preserves its random coldness and thus opens itself to the variety of interpretations reflected in the many voices incorporated in the text. The impossibility of its accurate depiction speaks in favor of the Danubes natural polysemy. What is more important, its indeterminacy calls for a new kind of explanation, one which is left to Magris-the-professor to provide. If it is true that a name is a sign, then the title of Magris book confirms his desire to puzzle readers with its semantics. The name for the river Danube, in Italian (Il Danubio) requires the same definite article Il that is found in the English usage (the Danube). Yet interestingly enough, Claudio Magris decides to entitle his book Danubio, leaving the article out. Although there is the occasional practice in Italian literature of leaving articles out in book titles, to hint that they are valuable monuments in national high culture, Magris choice points to some important elements in his approach to Central Europethe indeterminacy and polyphony of the Danube, its metaphoric and geographic cluster.
* Lo schema la bozza di uno statuto della vita, se vero che lesistenza un viaggio, come si suol dire, e che passiamo sulla terra come ospiti. (Danubio 11)

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If books, once written, are universal and aimed toward infinity, then articles are of no importance in baptizing the river-text. Such high-culture names speak to eternity, as if they were carved in stone, not written on a piece of paper. Consequently, articles are again of little importance, in this sense. A Danube/the Danube: on the eternal scale claimed by high culture, the difference is irrelevant. But keeping in mind Magris playful treatment of signifiers, there must be something more fundamental in his choice of leaving the article out. Il Danubio is the river -- the Danube, as a physical reference. But Danubio is simply Danube -- something else -- different and freer than the geographical and historical river. The instability in naming reflects an additional scientific instability: the question of the Danubes source is not even close to being resolved, for example. It quite literally does not exist as a determinate physical entity, according to the norms of scientific geographies. In geographers realities, there are many little Danubes surrounding the rivers source in the Black Mountains. Uncertainty about the waters beginning once more logically implicates the nominal uncertainty of the books title. If Magris were to have named his book Il Danubio, then he would have implied that the name signifies some kind of geographic stability, that it refers to a river with a clear identity. But scientific reality speaks against any determinacy in this particular case, and therefore Magris fictionalizes so-called objective reality in the very first step of inscription performed by his professor-persona. Danubio instead of Il Danubio; Danube, instead of The Danube. By naming Il Danubio Danubio, Magris suggests that the river should be seen not as a fixed entity, but as a sign aimed toward its own realization. Danubio thus becomes a personal name -- the name of a fictional character, Danubio, who enjoys the same fictional status in the narrative as do the other characters: Gigi, Amedeo, Francesca, Maria Giuditta . . . Except, of course, that regardless how superficially treated, all the other characters possess a gendered identity. Although all large bodies of water presume feminine gender, Danube is not really gendered in English. In the original Italian, Il Danubio is male. In German (which is the rivers native tongue, at
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least at its source), die Donau is female. Magris thus named his river Danubio, not in the way scientists name nature, but according to how parents name their children, not yet knowing them, but hoping that they will succeed in making their names meaningful. Like children in their beginnings, from the very start, Danube sponsors conflicting cultural and scientific schemes.11 The question arises: where is Magris Danube? Section 29 of the second chapter, The Universal Danube of Engineer Neweklowsky, asks the same question: Three rivers meet in Passau, where the little Ilz and the great Inn pour their waters into the Danube. But why should the river formed by their confluence, which flows on toward the Black Sea, be called - and in fact be - the Danube? Two centuries ago Jacob Scheuchzer, on page 30 of his Hidrographia Helvetiae, observed that the Inn at Passau is broader and deeper than the Danube, and has a greater volume of water having a longer course to its credit. Dr. Metzger and Dr. Preusmann, who have measured the breadth and depth of the two rivers, support him. Is the Danube therefore a tributary on the Inn, and should Johann Strauss have composed his waltz to The Blue Inn, which apart from all else can lay better claims to that colour? Plainly, since I have decided to write a book about the Danube, I cannot possibly accept this theory, any more than a professor of theology at a Catholic university can deny the existence of God, the very object of his science. (Danube 122)*
* A Passau confluiscono tre fiumi; la piccola Ilz e il grande Inn si gettano nel Danubio. Ma perch il fiume formato dalla loro confluenza, che scorre verso il Mar Nero, deve chiamarsi ed essere il Danubio? Un paio di secoli fa Jacob Scheuchzer, nella sua Hidrographia Helvetiae, a pagina 30, osservava che lInn, a Passau, pi ampio, pi ricco dacqua e pi profondo del Danubio ed ha anche un percorso pi lungo alle proprie spalle. Il dottor Metzger e il dottor Preussman, che hanno misurato i piedi di larghezza e di profondit dei due fiumi, gli danno ragione. Dunque il Danubio un affluente dellInn, e Johann Strauss ha composto il valzer del BellInn blu, che oltretutto potrebbe rivendicare a

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Magris rightly decides to turn away from a science that is meant to explain objective reality and to confront that reality with a realm of aesthetics. Moreover, in this passage, he decisively closes his eyes to the objective reality of the river, as well, because his topic simply cannot be explained through objective reference. Instead of justifying his narrative against a so-called extra-textual or objective world, Magris produces a reality based upon his personal interpretation. After all, in Passau, science negated the Danube (Scheucher, Metzger, Preusmann), while art affirmed it (Strauss). Another art, the art of memory, whose data is being collected throughout the journey of Magris fictional characters, is gradually redrawing the borders of the Danubes identity. In his narrative search for the source of the Danube, Magris cannot simply mimic any scientific discourse in its original empirical and experimental meaning. At best, he can only follow the narratives of science and report about their observations and results. Yet, even those reports are limited, because a scientific discourse behaves in its own fashion; it codifies reality and translates it into a story using its own particular language. Magris still cannot literally describe the Danube, because he may scientifically end up by describing the Inn. Nor can he re-invent the Danube, because then he would be asked to offer a scientific proof for the Danubes existence. In this particular context (leaning toward science) the fact that the Danube appears (even in Passau) does not necessarily mean that the Danube exists in any referential way. For a literary author, the reality of the Danubes being there in Passau, as it appears in the book, does not need to find its affirmation in any pedantic notebook of a scientist who would be eager to name, define and comprehend it in any objective way. Magris Danube, in order to be, just has to flow toward the Black Sea; it has to reach its estuary. The reality of Magris decision to write a book about the Danube makes his subject real, simply because it can be narrated.
maggior diritto quel colore? E evidente che, avendo deciso di scrivere un libro danubiano, non posso accogliere questa teoria, come un professore di teologia in ununiversit cattolica non pu negare lesistenza di Dio, loggetto della sua scienca. (Danubio 142-143)

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Instead of being realistic in scientific terms and referring to the objective reality of Danubian landscapes, Magris travel-record seems to become historically real in another way because of the reality of his genuine desire neither to imitate nor to portray the Danube, but to understand its own nature. His writing, though, still remains mimetic in certain ways, because Magris must still represent that nature in terms acknowledged in various forms of Central European reality, by drawing on established traditions of thinking its presence. In writing Danubio, Magris chooses rather to restore all the important segments of this reality by inventorying many of its appearances. Following this premise, any presence, appearance, or representation of the river would assume the ability of providing Magris with a precise definition of the Danubeat its source, on its way to the Black Sea and on to its end. Magris shows the reader that any possible way of thinking about the river could actually define our experience of it. Faced with the objective authority of science, Magris solution to his narrative problem is his recourse to historically established tropes of narration, as represented by each of his fictional voices, but not authorized over one another. In order to map out the space for his literary intervention as truth, he has invented the most suitable medium for his particular mimesis -- the one which combines many voices of modernism, including scientific objectivity, to become uniquely postmodern. Not just science and philosophy, but also poetry and political narratives are the media for Magris writing. Since there is no such thing as the Danube present in its entire and undisturbed length, Magris mimesis cannot reduplicate reality, but rather will only re-generate it creatively for the personal experience of his readers. His choice of a river that is not in terms of its self-explanatory continuity and coherence, responds to the nature of Central Europea nature that cannot be duplicated within the realms of imagined modernist semantic coherence. Magris decision to use seemingly unstable aesthetic signs does not shy away from strict scientific determinants and requirements. He underscores the fictitious nature of the borders between the scientific and the creative discourses, acknowledging both not as parts of the intellectual
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historys hierarchy or the hierarchy of the history of ideas, but rather as different genres, as different modes of writing the world. AmedeoA Secret Historiographer of Misguidance Once it disappears in Passau, the Danube does not simply become fictional. Instead Magris demonstrates that, from its very beginnings, Danube is referentially nonexistent but nonetheless real as experience. If this is the truth about the Danube, then the river becomes the epitome of the entirety of Central Europe. Magris calls on many other discussions that debate or explain the beginnings of Danube, all of which stress the ambiguity of the Danubes reality and the indeterminacy of its source. Each discussion ties into a different historical master narrative that has been imposed on the region. One among such narratives tells us that there is a plaque mounted at the source of the Breg River in Southern Germany with the legend: Here rises the principal branch of the Danube (Danube, 19). Originally meant to make the story of the Danube simple by affirming its source, the plaque, read by many interpreters, actually caused a centuries-old political dispute over the historical narratives confirming the rivers origins. Because of this on-going dispute, two German towns (Furtwangen and Donaueschingen) acknowledge one other as rivals in an identity/custody battle. This following paragraph illustrates how Magris travesties such battles about reality while nonetheless acknowledging their consequences as serious for the lives of two political communities: Without wishing to summarize the age-old library of publications on the subject -- they stretch from Hecateus, predecessor of Herodotus, to the issues of Merian magazine, on-news-stands now -- we should at least mention the aeons for which the source of the Danube was as unknown as that of the Nile, in whose waters it is in any case reflected and mingled, if not in re at least in verbis, in the comparisons and parallels between the two rivers which for
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centuries tread on each others heels in learned commentaries. (Danube 19)* In this passage12, we see how (nostalgically) Magris again combines narrative strategies drawn from the philosophical context of modernism to remind the reader of their postmodern consequences. This battle between towns, like many others, rests on the contextually-outdated ontological dichotomy between reality in re and in verbis, according to which reality resides in re, while fiction is created in verbis. Such a definition makes Magris sentimental retrospective on European modernism almost ironic as a political reality. Knowing that the existence of his Danubio has no complete counterpart in re, but rather that it is almost completely initiated and represented in verbis, Magris attempts to shift his readers attention to the ways the rivers reality is created by narrative for various purposes. In their original logocentric usage, if not and at least are connectives signaling evaluative relations, suggesting that the textual existence of material things is purportedly backed up by a real existence.13 Because of the plaque, however this Danube exists as a political dispute, not as a narrative or as scientific evidence. As he describes the various narrative identities of the Danube, Magris finally gives priority to Amedeos opinion. In this, temporary narrative choice, the author once again affirms the coexistence of different historical narrative traditions and illustrates how each travesties and simultaneously reifies the others. Amedeos insight offers an objective account of the Danubes indeterminacy: Here rises the principal branch of the Danube, states the plaque by the source of the Breg. In spite of this lapidary claim the centuries-old dispute over the sources of the Danube is still raging, and is in fact responsible for heated
* Senza voler riassumere la millenaria biblioteca sullargomento, che va da Ecateo, il predecessore di Erodoto, ai fascicoli della rivista Merian nelle edicole, basta ricordare gli evi per i quali il Danubio era di sorgente ignota come il Nilo, nelle cui acque esso del resto si rispecchia e si confonde, se non in re almeno in verbis, nei commenti dei dotti. (Danubio 16)

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contention between the towns of Furtwangen and Donaueschingen. To complicate matters, a bold hypothesis was recently set forth by Amedeo, highly esteemed sedimentologist and secret historiographer of misguidance, according to whom the Danube is born from a tap. (Danube 19)* This passage begins in a scientific tone, and ends in a fairy-tale conclusion: the source of the Danube is a faucet. Magris dedicates an entire section (La relazione/The Report) to Amedeo and his scientific discourse on tracing the source of the Danube in order to force the readers to react to science as a possible reality, instead of the ultimate one. In order to continue his upstream journey to the source of the Danube, and thus to explore the impossible, Claudio the Pilgrim now refuses to follow the cultural historians and scientists. Instead, he embraces Amedeo, the novels historiographer of misguidance. By making this choice, the author indicates that he has done away with the Cartesian question of the primacy of the material world. His decision opens up new ways for his text to refer to reality without defining it. In the Danubian travelogue, reality does not appear through depiction, but rather is produced within the narrative. The narrative ethics of this choice again confirm that the absence of referential truth as demonstrated by the absence of a real Danube, does not mean that Magris is losing his claim to mimetic representations. Instead, by emancipating the traditional definitions of the river, Magris has emancipated referential narratives from their traditional realms. The narratives around the metaphor of the river can now become productive references (Ricoeur),14 a tool to create a fiction which does not only discover but can also change reality.
* Qui nasce il ramo principale del Danubio, dice quella targa presso la sorgente della Breg. Nonostante questa dichiarazione lapidaria, il plurisecolare dibattito sulle fonti del Danubio tuttora acceso ed anzi responsabile di vivaci contese fra le citt di Furtwangen e di Donaueschingen. A complicare le cose si aggiunta, inoltre, di recente lazzardata ipotesi sostenuta da Amedeo, apprezzato sedimentologo e segreto storiografo di disguidi, secondo la quale il Danubio nasce da un rubinetto. (Danubio 16)

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Unable to find sufficient grounds in scientific and literary traditions to confirm the reality of Danube and governed by his own senses and faculties which do not lie, Magris has chosen Amedeo in order to elevate his referential apparatus and convert it into a productive tool. Amedeos scientific fiction does not reflect reality, nor is it indifferent toward reality in terms of self-reference. Instead, Amedeos amusing approach to fiction tells the truth po-ethically by glossing over the inherent uncertainties about the referents identity and promoting the absence of the topic into a productive non-essentialist source for new narratives about the region, especially for non-hegemonic ones. As expected of a non-hegemonic fiction, Amedeos report is written in pubs and revised in the Clock Museum, in the midst of forests of pendulums, where time appears objectively, as anything but a linear or abstract category. More narratives emerge in different inns, tormenting their author, who has figured out that, by nailing down his report to a single set of findings, he would actually betray the protean nature of the topic he is supposed to examine. Amedeo has discovered that he is pursuing scientific oblivion, as he loses himself in those uncertain landscapes of the Danubian lands. As time goes by in his travels, Amedeo appears calmer and calmer. And this is to be expected, because what could possibly be more real than ones concordance with Nature? He is slowly losing his faith in science, and trusting his own experience. When he and Maria Giuditta finally enter the house where Amedeo believes the tap of the Danube is located, they encounter an old and cranky woman who tells them that there is water running into the gutter from a basin which is constantly full, and that there is no point in trying to stop it because absolutely no one can turn the faucet off. After a while, she also told them that this is all connected to a lead pipe, which may well be as old as the house, and which ends up God knows where (Danube 24). Magris uses this humorous story to challenge Amedeos possible sense of loss about science and traditional literature; however, before he can actually liberate another voice to confirm Amedeos new and non-hegemonic fictional markers, Magris explains his reasoning. Aware that there is no
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such a thing as an empirical referent in tracing the Danube, Amedeo had decided to look for the real within the things and objects whose reality is to be sought in his own consciousness--as stories of other kinds, not as objects. According to Amedeo, not the material existence of the water, but its visibility to him, now becomes the criterion for its existence. Its exposure to the sky and to the eyes of humanity (Danube, 24) confirms the existence of Danubes gutters, at least once the old woman can explain them, putting them into a narrative of everyday life. This last exploration of metaphors for the Danubes source and existence allows Magris to decisively combat the modernist poetics of origin. The novel then follows this threefold introduction so that the relation of geopolitical truth and narrative is neither realistic nor modernist, but rather phenomenological and postmodern. Hereafter, Magris- the-narrator uses methods of phenomenology to assemble the scattered particles of reality that appear to the reader and to his travelers as a Danubian landscape, perhaps even outside established historical, cultural, and scientific tradition. In spite of the Danubes positive absence as a stable signifier, its productive references as narrative are still real, because the fictional varieties of presence of the river that they produce correspond to the plenitude of realities present in the various philosophical, historical, scientific, and aesthetic narratives that govern and have governed the life of Central Europe for centuries -- for the same centuries during which all the fictional and fluctuating manifestations of the Danube have escaped definition. Claudio the Pilgrim The immorality of the river in escaping such geocultural definitions is made the topic of Magris third, and most referentially rigid narrative perspective, that of Claudio the-pilgrim, Magris closest personal double, whose textual investigation, at least for the moment, insists on the kind of scientific arguments that Amedeo has already revealed as bankrupt. In the section that follows Amedeos enchantment with the mythical faucet (Moralisti e geometri alle
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sorgenti della Breg / Moralists and Geometricians at the sources of Breg), Claudio the Pilgrim momentarily regains his declarative Modernist confidence (in verbis) and, with the authority of an author, states that the tap does not exist: In the first place, that tap does not exist. It is not difficult to follow Amedeos itinerary. I take the few steps from my branch downhill to the source of the Breg, then sousing my shoes and socks, climb up through the meadow toward the house. The water glitters in the grass, the spring flows quietly out, the green of the trees is good, and so is the smell. The traveler feels rather clumsy and small, aware of the superior objectivity in which he is framed. (Danube 25)* This previously debated empirical superior objectivity now seems to be recuperating itself. At least for the moment, the traveler (Claudio the pilgrim) decides to return to referential reality as he takes off his shoes and socks, and returns to the innocence of a child. Yet, the apparatus of phenomenology will be of utter importance in bracketing the purported reality of the region. On more than one occasion, this same author must confirm that there simply is no tap. He thus divides once more the realm of objectivity from that of Amedeos wanderings. Instead of embracing the existence of the tap (and consequentially of the Danube) in verbis (Amedeos verbis in particular), Claudio the pilgrim decides to take his own steps in investigating the reality: sousing his shoes, he climbs toward the house in order to see the truth. Later in the text, Claudio notes that his steps toward the house are like sentences on a sheet of paper: (his)
* In primo luogo, quel rubinetto non esiste. Ripercorrere litinerario di Amedeo non difficile. Scendo i pochi metri che separano la mia panchina dalla sorgente della Breg e risalgo il prato, bagnandomi calze e scarpe, verso la casa. Lacqua brilla fra lerba, la sorgente fluisce tranquilla, il verde degli alberi buono, e anche il suo odore. Il viaggatore si sente un po goffo e meschino e avverte la superiore oggettivit della cornice che lo avvolge. (Danubio 16)

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foot tries out the waterlogged soil and avoids a puddle as the pen encircles and crosses the blank spaces of the page, circumventing a clot in heart and thought, and carries on. Writing ought to be like those waters flowing through the grassfull of spontaneity, fresh and timid but inexhaustible. (Danube 25). This simultaneous idealization of writing and recognition of its limits and powerlessness in front of the worlds mysteries resembles an intellectual surrender and brings Claudio closer to Amedeos playful resignation because that secret historiographer of misguidance would have definitely agreed with Claudios decision to walk through the wet grass and to close his eyes to science to explain the subject matter of his book. But Claudios perseverance transcends this ambiguity, and underscores his awareness of the narrative reality of his journey. His language becomes almost stubborn in repeating that resolute statement about the absence of the tap. This Danube is no longer part of science. Now, it is relegated to the status of a fairy tale: However, there is no tap in the house. Its an old house: the kitchen dates back to 1715. An old women, who appeared on the doorstep rather snappily warns us not to steal, but to listen, (Danube 26).* Claudios clear and short statement acquires another, longer explanation, based upon his authoritarian voice whose usage of scientific discourse is aimed toward establishing the finality of his narrated empirical truth: There is no tap, no tap at all, either in the house or outside. The water that drenches the meadow in which rises
* Un rubinetto, comunque, nella casa non c. La casa antica, la cucina risale al 1715; una vecchia, apparsa sulla soglia, invita bruscamanete a non rubare e ad ascoltare, (Danubio 26)

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the source of the Breg comes out of a pipe stuck upright in the earth. Slightly higher up are a few patches of white, and it may be the melting snow, align with other local rivulets, contributes to the volume of water which keeps the meadow sodden. In any case, the water rises through the pipe and overflows. The old woman has put a hollowed-out log under the outlet of the pipe, forming a kind of gutter. The tube pours water into this primitive gutter, which in turn empties into a bucket. Here the old woman collects what water she needs. The bucket is always full, and the excess water, pouring in unceasingly, streams down the slope, floods and inundates the meadow, and drenches the land from which, in the hollow down the hill, springs the source of the Breg, which is to say of the Danube. (Danube 27)* But the literature professor now runs into other historical traditions. This is not a new discovery (Danube 27) because Johann Hermm. Dilheim already speaks of the house on Mount Abnoba in 1785, from the roof of which one gutter pours water into the Danube, and the other into the Rhine (Danube, 27). Earlier in our narrative, the Danube had almost lost its name to a much smaller river, the Breg. Now, in spite of the exactness of Claudios tractatus about the nonexistent tap, his voice plays a new role in the ongoing game of appearance and reality. His and Dilheims perspectives, each special and specialized in its own way,15 join to demonstrate that, at the same time, everything and nothing appears to seem and
* Non esiste nessun rubinetto, n in casa n fuori. Lacqua che irrora il prato dal quale sgorga la Breg viene da un tubo, piantato diritto nel terreno; un po in alto si vedono macchie bianche, fosse la neve che si scioglie alimenta, insieme ad altri rivoli, lacqua di cui imbevuta la terra. Comunque lacqua sale lungo il tubo, e ne trabocca. La vecchia ha applicato al tubo un tronco cavo, che forma una specie di grondaia. Il tubo getta lacqua in questa grondaia rudimentale, che la scarica a sua volta in un secchio, nel quale la vecchia raccoglie lacqua che le serve. Il secchio sempre pieno, e lacqua in eccedenza, che arriva di continuo, scende lungo il pendo, inonda e imbeve il prato, irrora il terreno dal quale, nella conca pi in basso, nasce la sorgente della Breg ossia il Danubio. (Danubio 26)

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to be real -- in the past, or now. There is no scientific progress, there are only different narratives, each seeking to impose its authority on our perception of reality. When Magris-the-author contrasts the last two narratives (Amedeos and Claudios), he is motivated to contrast their seemingly different ideologies. The realities of those ideologies reside in two different modes of representing and writing the world-- a literary and a scientific one. In order to examine the Danubian state of affairs in re, Claudio in verbisinvokes the empirical evidence of science. At the same time, he must admit that his footsteps remind him of a text; that his walk to the house is a literary walk with which he intends to fill up the margins of a page rather than to explain the primary source of the Danube. This repeated ambiguity on a textual level echoes and equals the scientific ambiguity of the beginnings of the Danube (or the Breg? or the Inn?). It is an ambiguity which decides not to define itself against the fictitious and thus empirically unreal narrative worlds, but instead to enrich the illusion of its indisputable presence through a game of comparisons and mirrors. In this game, in order to reflect upon the things, the reader not only needs to think about things. She is also supposed to multiply the images in order to expose them to the sky and to the eyes of humanity (Danube 24), to reveal the claims of authority hidden in each narrative of the truth of the Danubes Central Europe. Claudios scientific trip, which hoped to undermine Amedeos bad treatment of evidence, did not end in negating his traveling companions endeavor. On the contrary, the nonchalance of Claudios indecisive treatment of the Danubes name reveals the importance of art and literary narration as a corrective force to the narratives of science and politics, for instance. As Claudio himself explains, even before he decided to present the readers with his scientific excursus: Little inclined to exactitude, the writer prefers to ramble on a bit, to come up with a few moral critiques of the supposed exactitude of science (Danube 26).16 The Danube (or the Breg) is a large body of flowing water which escapes definition. In spite of its resistance to definition, in spite of the very real possibility that the Danube may not be the
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Danube at all, but is instead just a name that signifies its own absence, in this novel and beyond it, Magris Danube is a world. The Danubian world follows the rivers currents from the Black Mountains to the Black Sea, representing a civilization whose essence (if any) is still to be recognized by a new de-colonizing, regional narrative. Johann Herm. Dielheim, who for some reason decided to hide (or gain) his identity behind the pseudonym Danubian Antiquarius, spoke of the two gutters, one pouring water into the Danube, and the other into the Rhine. In spite of such an aqueduct, there can hardly be a river less likely to be compared to the Rhine than the Danube. Unlike the Danube, the Rhine is Germany. The Rhine is a mythical custodian of the purity of the race (Danube 29). The Danube is not pure enough to be crowned with anything close to the German aura. Too many different tribes meet and live along its waters for the Danube to be a custodian of stability. And this disorder is exactly the beauty of the Danubes resistance. If there were a clear way to define the sources of the Danube, this entire story would not correspond with the truth and so would be a lie. Similarly, because it resists spiritual geometry, the Danube does not circumscribe the world of Thomas Mann, Wagner, Hegel or Heidegger. In its flux, it invites to its banks the sleepwalkers whose entire beings are based on Stirners, Schulzs, Kafkas, Musils, Brochs, Haseks, Meyrinks, Wittgensteins, Weiningers, Freuds, or Krleas senses of emptiness and nothingness. Unlike the Rhine, the Danube is the river of Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade -- a trans-national signifier that enabled the Kaiser to speak of his peoples and not to sound any more ridiculous than the Danube finds appropriate.17 In spite of the polyphony of the individual perspectives depicted in the book, all of Magris characters take Maddalenas question about the ambiguous faucet seriously, especially in a political sense. She asked what would happen if somebody turned the faucet off? Although both Amedeo and Claudio agree that no one can turn the water off, and despite the mysterious existence of the tap, Maddalenas question sounds cautious and prophetic as an global regionalists address for history. Instead of answering it within the empirical discourse of Claudio the pilgrim, Magris the author uses it to re127

mind himself of the ephemeral nature of Central Europe. Yes, Budapest, Vienna or Belgrade would definitely not look the same if somebody deprived them of the water, but this is not what Maddalena had asked. Although always seen through Magris eyes as a beauty who walks too slowly, Maddalenas question has actually opened a new realm of discussion, beyond the realm of the masculine narratives in the Danubes story. Like all the voices examined, she decided to use the Danube as an allegory of reality. Yet, when she asked her seemingly simple question, the universal question hidden behind her unassuming and naive words emerged as the most fundamental question about the world: what will happen there if something happens here? Whether she knew the Danube or was just chasing it, she could not have addressed a more appropriate issue, one that uncovers the core of fragile and turbulent Central Europe. Her question is crucial because it addresses the essential connection of a region geopolitically and economically located in between the West and East, and, at the same time, geoculturally tormented between the grand narrative of the two former political blocks and the needed regionalism that has yet to be introduced into new historical perspectives. Perspectives of such desired regionalism must be de-hirerachized in their relation to centers regardless of the quality of their powers. Even if it is true that a natural science deals with the items whose accuracy is either assumed or is yet to be proved (either in an empirical or experimental way), this is not what interests Claudio. All the empirical manifestations of the Danube have become real in a phenomenological sense because they expose themselves to the sky and to the eyes of humanity (Danube 24). Experiments stand only in metonymic relation to Nature: they substitute as a simulacrum for it. Just like a work of fiction, while intending to explain and possibly to improve objective reality, an experiment acts as a synecdoche that, in a paradoxical way, forges, minimizes, and at the same time universalizes the objective data of the real. Even in his own synecdoche, as Claudio, Magris uses experiments and explanations based on scientific discourse as just other modes of writing, other kinds of fiction. This textual awareness of the linguistic
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realm of communication, in this case, does not follow the original expectations of a scientific experiment. By adding various narratives, Magris does not produce a meta-narrative which can explain and justify a particular view of reality. Instead, his awareness of language reveals the natural sciences (Geography, Hydrology, etc.) as different ways of writing, as different genres whose metalanguages operate with another symbolic order, parallel to that of so-called objective reality. All individual narratives in Danube fictionalize reality in the process of their seeming contradictions in relation to parts of individual experiences. Magris idea of the natural sciences, one should recall, was already illustrated in the part of the book that speaks about Bellinn blu (the beautiful blue Inn). In this framing, quite objectively, the Danube ought to be seen as a tributary to the broader, deeper and bluer Inn. As the reader recalls, three rivers meet in Passau, the Ilz, the Inn and the Danube. Although both the Ilz and the Inn pour their waters into the Danube, at the point of their encounter, the Danube is neither the largest nor the deepest river. In spite of such a reality, the smaller Danube does not surrender its name. This discrepancy in the controversial scientific situation thus leads to a very legitimate question: why should the river formed by their confluence be called the Danube? This is a metaphor for the fundamental question of Central Europe: why should a region that has never been decolonized to have its own kind of self-awareness deserve to be remembered as a power in history? Magris the author easily dismisses the argument targeting its own irony and invoking Strauss waltz, which in itself, like tortes, Strudel, and maids, on a superficial (but very real) level, stands for Central Europe, or at least for the German-dominated Mitteleuropa. In Passau, science denied the Danube. Further on its way to the Black Sea, the Blue Inn, cross-dressed as die Donau, failed to seduce art (Strauss). Following the same path of art and poetics, Magris travelogue has demonstrated how narratives advocate particular visions of reality, like Strauss notes in a waltz that make the Danube the un-erasable river by giving it an appealing but arbitrary identity.
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But what would Claudio the pilgrim think of Magris decision to use the art of memory and the productive fictional references in order to dismiss the potentially subversive dialogue between arts and sciences? Since he did not hesitate to challenge Amedeos mythic enchantment with the fictitious taps, he most probably would not be at ease with Magris decision either. Claudios persistent belief in the natural sciences is evident in the following soliloquy: Fortunately I am rescued by a science, by perceptology, according to which if two rivers mingle their waters the one to be considered the main stream is the one which, at the point of confluence, forms the larger angle with the subsequent course. The eye perceives (establishes?) the continuity and unity of that river and perceives the other to be its tributary. Let us therefore put ourselves in the hands of science and for the sake of prudence avoid looking too long at the confluence of the three rivers at Passau, or checking for too long on the width of that angle; because the eye, when it has stared too much at a certain point, grows hazy and sees double, reduces the clarity of perception to a little dot and runs the risk of bringing about some nasty surprises for the traveler on the Danube. (Danube 123)* Rescued by a science of perceptology while watching at the point where the three rivers meet and mingle, Claudio the pilgrim slowly surrenders his clear Western scientific vision, and deliberately mingles his perspective with these of Magris the author. Only
* Per fortuna mi soccorre appunto la scienza, le percettologia, secondo la quale se due fiumi mescolano le loro acque viene considerato fiume principale quello che, alla confluenza, forma un angolo maggiore col corso che procede. Locchio percepisce (stabilisce?) la continuit e lunit di quel fiume e percepisce laltro come un suo affluente. Affidiamoci dunque alla scienza ed evitamo tuttal pi, per prudenza , di servare troppo la confluenza delle tre acque a Passau e di verificare troppo lampiezza di quellangolo, perch locchio, a furia di fissare a lungo un punto, si vela e sdoppia le figure, mandando a pallino la chiarezza della percezione e rischiando di provocare brutte sorprese al viaggiatore del Danubio. (Danubio 143)

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when those two merge can he come to a conclusion that can bring the Danube into existence. Although divided, all the fictional characters on the journey are the different aspects of Claudio Magris, who, as the author as well as the owner of his own Central European literary travel agency, does not manipulate them to the point of transcending their innate personalities. Strictly speaking, if one recalls the principal division of the travelers in Danube, the passage just quoted does not necessary need to belong to Claudio the pilgrim. It can just as easily be read as the continuation of Magris own meditations upon the conflict between universal art and particular sciences. But that kind of simplification of the narrative (however plausible) would betray the peculiar multiplying narrative game which is at stake here. The polyphony of Magris text does not assume that a single grand narrative can construct a holistic perception of reality, which naturally emerges once all the separate voices are included into it, adding their singular views of the greater reality. On the contrary, staring at the three rivers can easily be attributed to Claudio , even if he were Magris double in the narrative.18 After all, his conclusion is not a betrayal of science; it is just its appropriation into one particular fictional voice, into one narrative segment that presents one facet of the rivers/regions reality. From his perspective, Claudio the pilgrim has succeeded in making a peace between the arts, sciences, and his own perceptionswithout jeopardizing the purity of their realms. After all, he admits that a science rescued him -- perceptology. A science similar to, but more empirical or experimental, than the phenomenology or literary science privileged by professor Claudio Magris himself.

Outow: a provisional conclusion

There is one further question to ask before concluding consideration of the Danubes sources and origins and solving the phenomenological problem about history as narrative set by Claudio Magris. The new question is not where the Danube begins, but what was
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Claudio rescued from by taking this journey and confronting all the various appearances of the Danube in culture and history. In his own words, in verbis, by pointing out an empirical fact about the point of confluence of three rivers, perceptology rescues him from his own dilemma. Caught between the Inn and the Danube, perceptology leads him to chose the latter as the dominant narrative. In making this choice, he rescues himself. More importantly, however, by dismissing the Inn, perceptology also rescues the Danube. On this level of reality as narrative, Claudios rescue is a consequence of the rescue of the Danube. Even though he is not the first to be saved by this choice, Claudio should still be grateful to perceptology, because it saves his fictional life. In other words, if it were not for perceptology, his personal deus ex machina, Claudio would not be able to survive as a fictional entity. If it were not for this rescue at the moment when Inn disappeared in the Danube, Claudio the pilgrim would have found his own estuary in Professor Magris himself. Unlike more traditional views which uniformly assume that a whole is derived from the sum of its parts, Magris postmodern prose works differently. Instead of putting the reality puzzle together, assembling the pieces in light of a whole, Magris methodology stresses the actual existence of that whole as an object or a phenomenon whose final manifestation is always already present in its parts -- parts that are always already designed to be assembled in one particular way. That is, the reality of the Danube is not the sum of all the stories written about it, but rather it is circumscribed, located by them. In the same way, the schizophrenic narrative web of Claudio, Magris, Amedeo, and Claudio Magris all point to one locus of speaking. Each intends the existence of the other, (Husserl). Each of their narratives intends one facet of the cultural and scientific history of Central Europe. The science of that region, as Weininger had known a century ago, is part of the travelogue, of its myths and utopias. So are its culture and politics. Each is a narrative that maps that region into a different reality, constructed by the agency of a different kind of authenticity and prioritizing a particular aspect of an individuals experience of geocultural reality.
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The moment Claudio were to decide to view science as a narrative technique whose free play of abstractions would rescue the Danube, he would betrayed the core of the scientific picture of the world based on the principles of empiricism. If he were to do so, to bring the question of the Danubes origin to a resolution, then Magris would not need his voice to narrate the Danube. His individual poet(h)ics of science would not be of any importance, and Claudio could easily withdraw and sink into the discursive realm of Magris authorial testimonies. If Claudio were to disappear in this way, the text would revolve around a much simpler set of narrative tensions based on a polarization between Amedeo (a wanderer, a dreamer, a Quixotic explorer who admires myths and pure fiction) and Magris (a paternal figure who is in favor of a variety of perspectives, but whose quest for order organizes his story in a linear and hierarchical way). Under these circumstances, Claudio would easily be a figure subordinated to Magris broader narrative competence. Claudio represents the particle of truth in an otherwise dubious master narrative. Aside from being a part of a postmodern discourse, he is a representative of traditional science, whose suggestive textual arguments liberate the river. Yet the Danubes dehierachized polyphony and its synchronic plurality of voices replace the polyperspectivness of its author. This play of many equivalent voices make Danube real and meaningful. Such Danube certainly does not need its definite article. Ultimately, Magris Central Europe is of textual origin. A river is real because, once narrated, it still remains open to interpretations. Hotels, inns, guest houses, and their utopias may be the temporary places from which a traveler can narrate his or her individual perspectives on the truth of the river, each isolated out of a historical polyphony of traditional representations of the Danube. In spite of such a narrative complexity, the readers should not fall into the trap of focusing on the small dots of their own argument for too long. Let us acknowledge Claudios survival, in his own words: What is certain is that the river goes downhill, like him who follows it. It is of small importance to ascertain the or133

igin of all the waters it bears along, and which mingle with its ripples. No family tree guarantees a hundred per cent of blue blood. The motley crowd pushing and shoving in our skulls cannot show an incontrovertible birth certificate, does not know whence it comes or what is its true name, Inn or Danube or any other at all; but it knows where it is going and how it will end. (Danube 123)* As a metaphor for Central Europe, Claudio Magris points to the need for agency in regard to existing geocultural narratives, not from claims that the region was once or will be real in a sense removed from the official textual testimonies of power and dominance. Just like Central Europe, the Danubes impurity and questionable sources do not jeopardize its existence, but rather confirm its heterogeneous being. Seen by the three narrators, the river achieves a different kind of reality located within the three parts of one intentional whole. These three varied narrative strategies for identifying the river, in a reverse way, also identify and define themselves as possible agents within this geographic space. The Danubes protean being is thus a metonymy of Central Europe, its cradle and reflection which grounds an ambiguous reality. Magris fictionalized Danube includes all of its real connotations (political, historical, intellectual, scientific/geographical) which also depend on its mythical dimensions. He shows how each of these perspectives creates a reality/realities seen as a kind of partial truth, related to an always-absent whole. This postmodern reality construct of Central Europe is, in Magris words, always available to the eyes of humanity. Still, the per* Quel che certo, che il fiume scorre a valle, come chi lo segue; poco importa appurare donde provengano tutte le acque che si porta dietro e che si confondono nelle sue onde. Nessun albero genealogico garantisce il cento per cento di sangue blu. La folla eterogenea che si pigia nel nostro cranio non pu esibire un inoppugnabile certificato di nascita, non sa donde proviene n quale sia il suo vero nome, Inn o Danubio o quale altro mai, ma se dove va e come andr a finire. (Danubio 143)

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manent shifts of Magris Danube are not polymorphously perverse; their travel is not immoral. On its way to the estuary, it shapes and re-shapes its landscapes whose polymorphy faithfully points out all the identities of Central Europe, each of them equally plausible and equally strange to the Central Europeans who are in a permanent process of individual as well as collective self-recognition. Magris Danubio claims that, although it may be more real in fiction, Central Europe exists and must be traveled as a region based upon diversity and made of non-dominant identities whose plurality has to be re-examined and rewritten in forms of various personal textual testimonies detached from the long-lasting hegemony external to its geography.

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This alludes to Heraclites doctrine of flux, summarized in the saying, You cannot step into the same water twice (Mourelatos 200). According to Mourelatos, the canonical statement (panta rei) of this paradox originally occurs only in Simplicius (Phys. 1313. II), and it is not certain that it belongs to Heraclitus. Yet Plutarch emends the saying by adding for fresh waters are flowing on, and ascribes it to Heraclites. The generally-accepted interpretation of the allegory is Platos, as outlined in Cratylus. Plato calls it the allegory of existing things in general, with the clear interpretation that everything moves on and nothing is at rest (Cratilus, 402a). For further accounts of Heraclites paradox, see also: Plato, Theaetetus (160d). He states: The mouth which allures in that river is that of yesterday, of today; perhaps Heraclitus is wrong, and we always bathe in the same river, in the selfsame infinite present of its flowing, and each time the water is deeper and more limpid (Danube, 147). Zeno of Elea was the Presocratic philosopher whose aporiae were meant to support Parmenides teachings on the timeless presence and eternal rest of things. One of his best-known arguments against motion is the flying arrow. It states: An object is at rest when it occupies a space equal to its own dimensions. An arrow in flight occupies, at any given moment, a space equal to its own dimensions. Therefore an arrow in flight is at rest (Kirk & Raven 294-295). For Zeno, motion is relative. Moreover, the existence of an object is not to be grasped empirically, but intellectually, within the intrinsic relation between the particles of the object (its essence) (see Plato, Parmenides, for the full version of this definition). For a competent account of the Presocratics, see Herman Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. W. Kranz (Berlin: 1952). Another interesting relation between Magris and the Western tradition of master narratives is found in his jovial follow-up to the Christian confessional genre, whose founding father is St. Augustine, and whose Italian counterpart is again Dante. The opening lines of La Commedia clearly define it as an intentionally confessional narrative (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi retrovai per una selva oscura/ch la dirrita via era smarrita//Ah, quanto a dir qual era cosa dura// esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte// che nel pensier rinova la paura!// Tant amara che poco pi morte;/ma per trattar del ben chio vi trovai,/ diro dellaltre cose chi vho scorte/). By chosing the same narrative trope, a guide who doubles his perspective, to inscribe his own personal meaning into the forthcoming journey, Magris pays a tribute to this ancient traveler whose record marks the beginnings of modern Italian literary culture. Otto Weininger was a young Austrian thinker whose book Sex and Character (published 1905, two years after his suicide) reflected common assumptions about gender relations and ethnic inferiority in the early twentieth century. Markedly pseudo-scientific, it was greatly influential throughout Central Europe. In his early twenties, he committed suicide in Vienna, in the night of 3-4 September 1903, by shooting himself in the heart. As a gesture to the master narratives

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he purported to represent, he died in the same house where Beethoven died, Schwarzspanierstrasse 15. 6 The invitation was signed by professors from Padova and Tbingen and read: Carissimo! L assessore di Venezia, sig. Maurizio Cecconi, sulla base del proggeto allegato ci ha avanzato la proposta di organizzare un mostra sul tema Larchitettura del viaggio: storia ed utopia degli alberghi. La sede prevista Venezia. Del finanziamento si interessebbero diverse instituzioni ed organizzazioni. Se Lei vorr dimostrare interesse per una collaborazione . . . (Danubio 11) Dear friend! Sig. Maurizio Cecconi, alderman of the city of Venice, has proposed that we organize an exhibition based on the enclosed prospectus, entitled The Architecture of the Journey: The History and Utopia of Hotels. The proposed location is Venice. A number of institutions and organizations appear willing to underwrite it. If you are interested in working with us . . . (Danube 15) 7 This discussion, aside from citing the original Italian text, uses the existing English translation of Danubio (Danube, trans. Patrick Creagh [New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1990]). In order to emphasize some crucial authors statements, I will intervene occasionally in Creaghs otherwise very readable translation; these changes will be indicated by square brackets. In order to highlight this distinction, one does not necessarily need to make claims on the modernist/postmodernisn paradigm shift, as I do here. These two different modes of truth-defining can be found by contrasting classical texts, such as Aristotles Metaphysics or De Anima, with Sophocles Oedipus Rex. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) defines truth as a product of the concordance between the objects and intellect, between mind and world --the referential theory of truth. Sophocles, although born 112 years before Aristotle, has a different idea of truth, based on an early linguistic turn, as in Oedipus Rex. At the end of his search for Laius murderer, Oedipus sends for a shepherd whose testimony is expected to be crucial. Explaining why he demands the second shepherds presence, Oedipus explains to Jocasta: I will tell you. If it turns out that his story matches yours, Ive escaped the worst (trans. R. Fagles, Norton, 336). He points out the main reason for the second shepherds importance: You said thieves -- he told you a whole band of them murdered Laius. So, if he still holds to the same number, I cannot be the killer. One cant equal many. But if he refers to one man, one alone, clearly the scales come down on me: I am guilty (Norton 336). His truth, the truth of the brutal patricide, is not expected to be found in any strict concordance between the reference and referent, between the utterance and the world, but rather resides strictly within the realm of the shepherds grammar. One cant equal many -- singular cant be plural. The truth Oedipus is looking for does not await its confirmation within Aristotelian correspondence theory, but within grammar, or within the coherence of the speech-act.

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When speaking generally, I will use the pronoun she/her. References to particular authors will logically follow their genders. This is not a willful decision on my part; a contextual reason reinforced my decision. Although successfully breaking many modernist codes, Magris seems to be oblivious to the issue of gender in the construction of reality he is describing. All the female characters in the novel, for example (Francesca, Maddalena, and Maria Giuditta), are ridiculously objectivized. Maria Giuditta is beyond aging, always young and desirable. Her timeless nature is only a projection of Claudios desire, therefore a boring and predictable male fantasy. Madalena is always at Gigis mercy. Her textual presence depends on his desire to take her for a walk. Francesca is entirely represented through a synecdoche: her long, beautiful legs. If Magris had been more sensitive to the issues of gender, he could have strengthened his arguments about his open search for the Danubes identity. Gender and sexual identities are crucial in determining and detecting selves. Once personified, the Danube could have been examined through the narcissistic scope of a gender identity. Uncertain of its source and thus undecided about its identity, Magris overlooked some potentially interesting items that would have helped him to re-arrange the Danubian puzzle. Although the title lacks the definite article il, in Italian il Danubio is masculine; yet in German (Magris holds a full-professorship in the department of Germanic Languages at the University of Trieste), die Donau is feminine. My use of she/her thus yields to Magris negligence of genders and is meant to redress the absence of that constitutive element of identities.

10 The term belongs to Edmund Husserl. 11 Magris found this version of the Danubes source in an old womans tale. 12 Later in this section, Magris elaborates on the variety of historical facts and material evidence available in order to illustrate other difficulties in determining the source of the Danube. Using the discourse of positivistic scientism, he mentions Herodotus, Strabo, Caesar, Pliny, Ptolemy, the Pseudo-Symcus, Seneca, Mela, Eratosthenes, etc. He also lists different conceptions of and imaginary solutions for the question of the Danubes source. Some of the historians and scientists he cites imagined its sources in Hercynian Forest, some in the land of the Hyperboreans, among the Celts or the Scythians, on Mount Abnoba, or in the land of Hesperia. Other sources mention a fork in the river, with one branch flowing into the Adriatic, along with divergent descriptions of the Black Sea estuaries (Danube, 18). His historico-scientific examination of the sources continues in a description of the variety of evidence used as testimony to explain the Danube in its historical as well as its material beginnings. 13 In re and in verbis hould be understood here as referring to the ontological distinction introduced in Ren Descartes rationalistic philosophy, in which the material items of so-called objective reality are defined in binary opposition. For Descartes, things either existed materially (de rem) or textually, verbally (de dictum). Things de rem had a priority within the metaphysical hierarchy of being(s).

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14 For a precise analysis of productive reference, see: Paul Ricoeur, The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality, Man and World 12 (1979): 123-141. 15 Not only here, but throughout the novel, science, myth and folklore each offer a partial experience of reality. Although they often sound totalizing, none of the partial insights are equiped to claim the totality of the subject/topic. 16 Poco incline allesattezza, il letterato preferisce divagare, moraleggiare sulle presunzioni dellesattezza scientifica (Danubio 25). 17 The Danube is German-Magyar-Slavic-Romanic-Jewish Central Europe, polemically opposed to the Germanic Reich; it is a hinternational ecumene for which in Prague Johannes Urzidil praised it: it is a hinterworld beyond the nations (Danube 29). 18 The tradition of doubles in Italian literature dates from its beginnings (Dante) and through the Modernism, more precisely Avant Garde (Papini, Pirandello), programatic Postmodernism (Calvino) finally reaches Magris. Although in his gigantic rhetorical gestures very respective towards the bards of Italian (and European) literature, when it comes to literary production, Magris is more inclined to operate with the productive experiences of Pirandello and Calvino in which the doubles are not the complementary counterparts of a desired whole, but rather liberated fictional creatures that yield to the chaotic and imperfect structure or this world. In order to become, they do not need to form a unit with its proclaimed whole. For them (and for their authors) it is enough to be around, to add their own perspective on something that cannot be fully explained. As its active interpreters, looking back (and only back) at the tradition of the twentiethcentury European literature (Gennett, Jarry, Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello, etc.) things do not need to be explained in order to be understood, they do not need to be logical and coherent, since they are true.

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Chapter 3: The Poet(h)ics of the Danube: Rethinking Identities

From Herr Kyselak to gospon Krleza

Magris decision to break modernist conventions and seek a more pragmatic poetic justice for a cultural region that is itself an unstable point of reference, obvious in the authors consistency and faithfulness to the natural, cultural, political, spiritual, or other geography/geographies of Central Europe. The truths embodied in the rivers geography are not implied a priori, but rather emerge in the process of writing/understanding the peculiar reality of the Danubian world. Magris po-ethical method is especially sensitive toward the issues of identity and identities which emerge as Central Europe is re-inscribed on the new literary map of the world. As the Danubian landscape engages in a process of self-recognition, any faithful cartography of Central Europe must denies ideas of singular, pre-conceived identities. The ambiguous, but still very real identity of the Danube already contains the paradoxical manifestations of particular identities of Central Europeans. Since all the peoples and individuals who live in the region (especially those from the eastern and south-central sections) are trapped in some historical present, they still follow their individual politics of identity by following the narrative politics of their immediate communities, often oblivious to the politics of the global community. Consequently, before any conclusions are drawn about the cultural-political
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consequences of that historical present, it is necessary to highlight the importance of an individuals singular quest for identity and agency in that shifting Danubian landscape. Following the poet(h)ics of the Danube, this chapter will begin with a slightly different journey, by taking a closer look at another of Magris fictionalized Central Europeans, Mr. Kyselak, about whom, for the moment, nothing need be known but his name. In preparing to trace Mr. Kyselaks own Danubian adventure, some of the planning underlining Magris strategies needs to be acknowledged. On the macrostructural level of Danubio, Magris poet(h)ics operates in a new kind of space -- in a postcolonial space which so far has not been seriously examined in previous treatments of Central Europe. Although the methods of colonizing the other exercised by England and France for instance differed from those practiced in Central Europe since the Romans, the daily dynamics and the overall experience of oppression was virtually identical. The same can be said for the reality experienced by Central Europeans after the disappearance of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Strangers to themselves on their own territory that never belonged to them long enough without a rupture; without a continuity needed for a group to grasp a clear identity concept, Central Europeans suddenly found themselves in a situation seemingly suitable for a free exchange of accumulated feelings of loss and displacement. The absence of master narrative that has been determining the condition of the region since the Roman Empire, during the Ottoman and Habsburg rule, and with the intrusions of The Republic of Venice, Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, all the way to the Soviet Unions hegemony along with various ideological identity occupations of lesser geopolitical dimensions such as the Titoist Yugoslavia, has produced a regional postcolonial condition. Such Central European postcoloniality after 1990 manifested itself in random, superficial, and brutal searches for both individual and collective sense of self similar to those found in African and Asian tribal wars that followed the withdrawal of their colonizers. The empirical reality of global postcolonialism essentially does not differ from the empirical reality of Central European Postcommunism. The latter was indeed, in all its manifestations and its prac142

tice (except for its ideological aspect), state capitalism. Unready and historically disabled to face their own reality without surrendering it to new masters, small peoples gave in giving away their opportunity to seize the moment. Instead they took part in a brief but naively ideologized national-populist dictatorships lead by nationalist entrepreneurs such as the Croatian Franjo Tuman, or by national-socialist opportunists like the Serb, Slobodan Miloevi. The anti-essentialist modes of signification and representation which have been attributed to Magris, especially when used as anti-essentialist strategies of reality construction through narratives, allow Danubio to be interpreted (or simply described) through the lenses of current post-colonial criticism, particularly appropriate to circumscribe a region which has been in fact colonized for two millennia. To confirm the applicability of his point of departure, one can look at a broad understanding of post-colonial discourse, as explained in Homi Bhabhas technical definition.1 In his essay, Postcolonial Criticism,2 Bhabha writes: Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of minorities within the geopolitical divisions of east and west, north and south. They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic normality to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the rationalizations of modernity (...) For to reconstitute the discourse of cultural difference demands not simply a change of cultural contents and symbols; a replacement within the same time frame of repre143

sentation is never adequate. It requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written, the rearticulation of the sign in which cultural identities may be inscribed. And contingency as the signifying time of counterhegemonic strategies is not a celebration of lack or excess or a self-perpetuating series of negative ontologies. Such indeterminism is the mark of the conflictual yet productive space in which the arbitrariness of the sign of cultural signification emerges within the regulated boundaries of social discourse. (Redrawing The Boundaries 437-438) According to this programmatic text, the main function of post-colonial criticism is to examine how historically-established hegemonies within which new world orders have to be investigated. It announces the struggle for a more accurate representation of pre-existing hierarchies, as well as the battle for a new cultural space. According to traditional views on colonialism and postcolonialism, the so-called Third World represents fertile soil for economic, political, and ideological exploitation, carried out by the so-called First World -- at least as Anglo- and Frankophone models and their attendant ideas of nationhood tacitly represent their cultural space. In this context, post-colonial discourse employed to rearticulate Central Europe may seem inappropriate. A prima vista, Central Europes location, geography, economy, social, ethnic and racial structures seem different from those of the traditional colonies. Yet it is interesting that, even in describing the Danube, nothing seems to be more appropriate than postcolonial criticism, especially in light of all the scattered identities of the Danubian lands as a cultural region that has been historically deprived of any public self-representation. Homi Bhabha, writes, Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of minorities within the geopolitical divisions of east and west, north and south (437). Although Bhabhas geopolitical matrix of colonial and postcolonial dynamics is so-called Third World, the very arbitrariness of its signifier supports the idea that postcolonial perspec144

tives emerge regardless of the place. Bhabha asserts that their topography is simply decided by power and as such, is in flux. He underscores the category of time instead that of space understanding time in history as a condition needed for imagined colonial topography to come into being. He is aware of the necessity of an opportune historical moment enabling colonial condition. After all, Third World is an arbitrary construct whose meaning is the product of hegemony. It is superimposed onto regions of a choice as a sign of their regress in relation to the self proclaimed First World, and its meaning is based solely on semantics of unrestrained power. The Third world always define and locate external others. In so doing they do not signify it positively. They simply name it using a false axiological category Third while excluding it from all the new world orders of re-colonization. Therefore, in order to apply both colonial and postcolonial theoretical apparatus anywhere in the world, one must first recognize dynamics and effects of various modes of colonial presence and occupation, and then compare those with the more familiar mechanisms and effects of imperialism in so-called dominant colonies. Since the new postcolonial model most appropriate in re-thinking Central Europe is not necessarily focused on well-known modes of centrifugal 3 colonization, the application of this theory to some may still seem problematic. But isnt the notion of emergence suggested in Bhabhas essay methodologically independent of the traditional colonial topography? This displacement actually empowers its practical employment. One of the applications of such a theoretical model is certainly the post-colonial reading of Central Europes cultural, political, social, economical and ideological strata. The best characterization of Central Europe is in terms of the various centripetal colonial narratives present in the region since ancient times, and best expressed in modern times by the Austro-Hungarian empire. Therefore, instead of agreeing about the applicability of the term colonization with its traditional boundaries, critics should think of it as a variety of different forms of colonial intervention within native lands. Magris postmodern travelogue, for instance, takes into account several forms of colonialism for which textual evidence exists in Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
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Bosnia, Slovenia, and Croatia, for instance. Although they were never on the official list of the world colonies, these countries narratives testify to the long-term colonial presence of foreign masters. From this perspective, Magris Danube emerges as a groundbreaking strategic travel guide through the troubled colonial landscapes of such small nations in the permanent custody of others. Unlike the older colonial testimonies, Magris does not aestheticize and name not-yet-aestheticized and/or signified items in order to possess them. He understands the nature of his task: even if he is in favor of modernist tradition, Magris allows the Danube to be what it is -- a postmodern phenomenon. Appropriately cross-dressed, he then follows it, not to provide the readers with an authoritative guide, but to behave as the rivers travel companion.4 In the course of his journey, Magris names the new, aestheticizes the not-yet-aestheticized, and codifies the unknown, but he does not do so in any rigid logocentric way, not from the security of a colonizers master narrative. Instead of appropriating the river and its narratives, its signs and its semiotic space, to his hegemonic needs in traditional terms, he leaves Danube to the qualities of its own nature and appearances -- exposing them, as he himself states, to the eyes of humanity (Danube 25). Magris narrative strategy thus opens a space in which individuals can rethink identities as well. Since his Danube is the Danube, a non-essentialist structure rather than a holistic entity, not only the identity of the region, but also that of its inhabitants, must be seen relationally, as the product of the interaction of the various narratives which have defined it culturally and geopolitically from above, and the sets of individual stories told by the underrepresented inhabitants of the Danubian basin.

Inscribing desire
The Lost Letters of Herr Kyselak Just as Magris offers a schema for understanding the region in a non-essentialist way, so does one of his fictionalized characters,
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Herr Kyselak. His fate allows us to see how a traditional individual, a member of the small family of (Central European) peoples, behaves in a context in which global dynamics shape individual lives. His example will hopefully shed a new, more humane, light on the tragicomic identity search still present in Central European nostalgia: It was perhaps the transience of the river that by way of contrast stimulated Herr Kyselak, assistant in the country registry of Vienna during the nineteenth century, and a tireless walker, to nourish a yearning for eternity, a craving to counter those fleeting waters with something stable. Unluckily nothing better came to mind than his own name, so he began to leave his signature, J. (Josef) Kyselak, in large black letters done in indelible oil paint, throughout his wanderings along the banks of the Danube, especially in the vicinity of Loiben and among the vineyards of the Wachau. He traced it on all sorts of things, for example on rock-faces. Like all those who have to sully Greek columns or the tops of the mountains, Kyselak aspired to a little scrap of immortality, and he got it. (Danube 154)* Josef Kyselak was not a person whose company one would desire. In a two-volume book of travel sketches,5 he spends plenty of time complaining how trivial everything (and more importantly, everybody around him) is. Frustrated with Kyselaks treatment of the
* stata forse la fugacit del fiume a suggerire, per contrappunto, al signor Kyselak, assistente al registro presso la camera di corte a Vienna, nel primo Ottocento, e solerte viaggiatore a piedi, unambizione di eternit, la smania di opporre a quelle acque fuggitive qualcosa di stabile. Purtroppo non gli venne in mente niente di meglio del suo nome e cos egli si mise a tracciare il suo autografo J. (Josef) Kyselak, a grossi caratteri neri e con indelebile colore ad olio, durante i suoi vagabondaggi lungo le rive del Danubio, soprattutto nella zona di Loiben e fra i vigneti della Wachau. Lo scriveva sulle cose, ad esempio su pareti di roccia. Come tutti coloro che imbrattano le colone greche o la cima delle montagne, Kyselak aspirava a una piccola immortalit e lha raggiunta. (Danubio 180)

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people who are supposed to be eager readers of his book, Magris compares him to a writer whose narrative strategy is based on the humiliation of the massesa writer whose mode of writing at least cannot harm anyone, because any reader who would read a book written by an author like this would simply be reminded that s/he is smarter than anyone else. Since the writer has not knowingly chosen this pattern, he communicates with the masses while actually undercutting himself. The humiliation unintentionally imposed by Kyselak thus ends in a paradox, since his own books are available to the masses. Those masses are, according to him, stupid. One should not expect that they would actually be able to comprehend the books contents, especially for one purpose onl for each individual, as a member of the group, to realize upon the reading, that only he or she is smart, as opposed to the rest of the reading community who read the same book. Disappointed with Kyselaks arrogance, Magris notes that this old pedestrian would be much better off if he had never written anything else, but kept on inscribing his name onto different objects situated on the banks of the Danube. Somehow, Magris notes, Kyselaks repetitive and predictable autographs carry more meaning in the historical space of the Danube than his officially recognized opus. His personal search for immortality thus confronts Magris two basic problems in defining the Danube -- statics versus dynamics. Obviously, Herr Kyselak wanted to challenge the eternal flux by asserting some mode of (individual) stability, some permanence of identity (at least as an author). His intention of justifying and fixing his being through a repetitive pattern of writing his name down the Danubes banks nonetheless brings the reader back to the strategic dilemma formulated at the very beginning of our discussion: by inscribing his name on every stable and firm object along the Danube, Kyselak actually imposes yet another kind of narrative of permanency onto the landscape and thus contradicts the unstable nature of the Danubian identity in a new way. Recalling the provisional binarism between Heraclitus and Parmenides concepts of a river flow, Magris Kyselak exercises the mobile agency of his identity as traveler while resting eternally on
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an invented identificationas a graffiti author. Herr Kyselaks insistence on inscribing graphic signs of his individual self in the form of wall scrawls is written by Magris into the Danubes narrative to exemplify how a metaphor translates into a textual strategy establishing a historical identity. The fact that Kyselak remains an active narrative ingredient (in spite of Magris pronounced critique of his Weltanschauung) leaves enough room for the readers to interpret his existence in the way(s) it pleases them. Magris offers the reader a multiplicity of individual experiences of Kyselak, of a character whose name is everywhere the Danube is, but whose essence is absent. This individualism, as well as the individuation of perceptions based on the authors search for an individual, brings a modernist world view (where an individual may be the agent of his own existence) closer to the worlds of postmodernism, where the subject vanishes and in which its absence, almost paradoxically, allows the subjective judgments of the readers to take the subjects vacant place. In other words, the absence of the master narrative of authorship in Danubio allows the reader to be the agent of the novels new realities. The subjective judgments in these new realities are not the properties of displaced subjects/individuals created by a master narrator, but rather newly-emerging spaces of productive ambiguity, stressing the subject seen as a construct in a constructed history. In such a context, Kyselak is not simply engaged in mediating between real and fictional parts of his self, nor is he aware of the distinction between an author and a character, because he will be remembered as a fictionalized graffiti artist written in existence by Claudio Magris. Such representation of his self does not determine his identity in any fixed way. Josef Kyselak really was a published author and an assistant in the court registry of Vienna; however, as depicted in the novel, he is represented outside the space of binary oppositions: he is revealed as the agent who exposes new potentials of the reality constructs in which he is engaged. Magris exploits Kyselaks actions to show how that author/ character exemplifies Magris own beliefs about the nature of the Danube as a Central European river. Magris concludes that, al149

though Kyselaks graffiti ultimately mean more than his literary work, his desire to inscribe his existence onto the flux of the river would have been performed authentically if he had actually never left any sign of his presence: The flight of the waters is certainly more magnanimous than the megalomaniacs fixity. It would have been better if Josef Kyselak had daubed the face of the world or, more modestly, simply the lovely region of the Wachau - with the name of someone else, of some beloved person, or with of those meaningless words that one repeats like a magic formula. Certainly he would have been a greater figure if he had gone around erasing his name instead of writing it. But the assistant in the registry was an inlander, unaware of waters, in spite of his excursions in the neighborhood of the Danube . . . (Danube 154)* Yet this playful displacement of identities is only a single step in a longer process that continuously rewrites and reduces the significance of signs meanings: Certainly he would have been a greater figure if he had gone around erasing his name instead of writing it (Danube 154). Magris favors erasure over inscription to describe the Danube. Kyselaks desire to inscribe his self onto a fluctuating landscape gradually emerges as a vicious circle: his intent is relativized as a performance when, nolens -volens, Kyselak ends up frantically searching for blank spots suitable for inscribing the same desire--his desire to become at least symbolically attached to all existing firm points of reference, to enter history permanently. His desire to do so teaches Kyselak a craft of self-liberation, or, more precisely,
* Certo la fuga delle acque pi magnanima di quella fissit megalomane. Sarrebbe stato meglio se Josef Kyselak avesse scritto sulla faccia del mondo --o pi modestamente, della bella regione della Wachau - -un nome altrui, quello di una persona amata, o una di quelle parole senza senso che si ripetono come una formula magica: certo egli sarebbe stato pi grande se fosse andato in giro a cancellare il suo nome anzich a scriverlo. Ma l assistente al registro era un continentale, un uomo di terraferma, nonostante le sue ecsursioni nei paraggi danubiani... (Danubio 180)

shows him how he can become emancipated from his most sacred cause, his malady, his need constantly to reconfirm his own identity (154). Magris is attracted by such examples of the unnamed, the unspoken, the absent, trying to assert existence or permanence. Magris aesthetic devotion to clearly-defined codes of modernist museums and galleries thus ultimately forces him to watch over his own footprints on the journey toward the seas of postmodern museums and catalogues. In this particular case, the victory of absence over presence is staged in a very careful manner. Before he names empty places whose void is far more poet(h)ical than all the directions, signs and signatures, Magris demonstrates his own awareness of centuries-old philosophical attempts to convert so-called negative categories into positive terms. This recognition of the negative (absence) and its strategic equation with the positive (presence) is a pattern in western metaphysics whose presence can be traced back to Plotinus6 and, via Russian Medieval mystics, E. Swedenborg, and the Russian avant garde, to the present epoch. In this tradition, one particular piece of advice given to the registry assistant Josef K(yselak) on how to behave with a pencil in his hand became the underlining scheme of his existence: he should write nonsense, inscribe meaningless words that one repeats like a magic formula (Danube 154). This particular solution once again speaks in favor of Magris cautious methodology in negotiating the spatio-temporal logic of the two kinds of narratives he is spanning (the modern and the postmodern). That Kyselak should write meaningless words was not meant either to silence or denounce his desire. This command is simply another appropriation of Magris authorial ideology, captured within the deontic7 world of his fictional creatures. Meaningless words offered to Josef Kyselak in this way were simply a stop in the midst of a paradigm shift, as the world of the text moves from rationalist to post-rationalist discourse. Russian avant garde authors like Majakovskij, Krushchennyh, and even M. Gorky,8 inspired by medieval mystics, sought to use such so-called trans-rational language, as a kind of religious communication with God, especially as a speaking in tongues.9 This mode of communication originally was in151

tended to speak directly with a divine agency, but avant garde writers reconceptualized it while retaining its mystical connotations and transrational patterns. They thus (re)introduced a language living at the borders between the rigidity of high Cartesian rationalism and what we see today as the de-hierarchized space of postmodernism as exemplified in free game of signifiers. Operating in this gradual way, respectful toward the past and open to the future, before Magris addressed absence in a positive way, he had to be certain that all other possibilities of applied poet(h)ics are exhausted, so he could introduce the absence of rational reference as a meaningful act of authorship. Before Kyselak could finally erase his name and thus most faithfully mark the landscape, he must be given the opportunity to inscribe some meaningless words, words that speak from beyond existing narratives, and which exemplify his sur-real search for personal identity in the Danubian space with which both authors (Magris and Kyselak) are engaged. Magris speaks of the unspoken or absence of the meaning of identity not only in the Kyselak episode, but also elsewhere in the book. Perhaps the best example of how Magris thematizes absence as a different kind of an authentic cultural presence can be found in the section entitled An Empty Tomb (Una tomba vuota): In the fields and woods of Oberhausen, a little before Neuburg, there is a small piece of land belonging to France, bought because it contains the sarcophagus of Thophile Malo Corret de Latour dAuvergne, first grenadier of the republican army. Formerly an officer in the Kings army, then a participant in the American Revolution, and subsequently in the French Revolution, he finally enlisted as a private soldier in the armies of Napoleon and died in battle on the Danube. The sarcophagus is empty, for his bones have been moved to Paris. In the solitude of the fields it is watched over, like a guard of honor, by a square of trees. The burial place is also reserved for the Forty, commander of the sixth
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semi-brigade of infantry, who died the same day, but the real protagonist is the private soldier, Premier Grenadier de France, tu le 8ime Messidor, an 8 de lre rpublicaine. After seeing this tomb, how mincing and glossy appears the Renaissance scenery of Neuburg! Churches, palaces, aristocratic mansions and noble courtyards seem like a period stage-set, with stylized, artificial wings to recreate the grace of Italian art on the banks of the Danube. That deserted tomb, on the other hand, speaks of glory, and at the same time the futility of it; it embodies the meaning of a life that takes up arms out of faith in a new banner, rather than putting them at the service of the wars between local princes, of family feuds; and it also stands for the great void that looms behind every glorious cavalcade and streaming banner; or else for the infinite, mindless background of the sky, outlined against which, in the film of universal history, rides the army of men who are summoned to die. (Danube 94)*
* Fra i prati e i boschi di Oberhausen, poco prima di Neuburg, un piccolo appezzamento di terra appartiene alla Francia, che lha comperato perch in esso si trova il sarcofago di Thophile Malo Corret de Latour d Auvergne, il primo granatiere dell armata repubblicana, gi ufficiale del re, poi combattente per la rivoluzione americana, e successivamente per quella francese, arruolatosi infine come soldato semplice nellesercito napoleonico e caduto sui campi di battaglia danubiani. Il sarcofago vuoto, le sue ossa sono state translate a Parigi; nella solitudine dei campi lo vegliano, come una guardia donore, alberi disposti in quadrato. Il sepolcro sarcofago riservato anche a de Forty, comandante della sesta semi-brigata di fanteria, morto lo stesso giorno, ma il protagonista sarcofago il soldato semplice, Premier Grenadier de France, tu sarcofago le 8 i sarcofago me Messidor, an 8 de lsarcofago re republicaine. Come appare, poco dopo, lezioso e laccato, rispetto a questa tomba, il paesaggio rinacsimentale di Neuburg. Chiese, palazzi, case patrizie, nobili cortili sembrano uno scenario teatrale storicizzante, quinte stilizzate e artificiali che ricreano sulle sponde del Danubio la grazia dellarte italiana. Quella tomba deserta invece la gloria e insieme la sua vanit, racchiude il senso di una vita che impugna la spada per la fede in una nova bandiera, anzich porsi al servizio di guerre principesche locali, di liti in famiglia, e racchiude pure il grande vuoto che si profila dietro ogni cavalcata gloriosa e ogni bandiera al vento, ovvero lo sfondo infinito e insensato del cielo, contro il quale si staglia, nel film della storia universale, larmata a cavallo degli uomini chiamati a morire. (Danubio 108)

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The great void (il grande vuoto) in this passage speaks the most meaningful truth about a region in which every individual existence played at least several roles -- all superimposed by history. The real hero of the battles, the Premier Grenadier of the republican army, is not even physically present there. The empty tomb whose void speaks its truth is guarded by the trees and the landscape. More than any other carnivalesque ceremony that could have been manufactured in Imperial headquarters, this tomb enacts and celebrates the useless death of a man who, like many others, died for ideas and fantasies that purportedly surpassed his individual existence. Yet the raw material of Central European history has been removed from the tomb. The grave is reserved for a post-mortem on-stage performance, cast and directed by the historical masters of previous imperial ceremony. The empty tomb waits for de Forty, the commander of an infantry brigade, a person whose war experience equals the carefully-nurtured skills of a chess master. The real tomb occupant is gone, and his absence, in spite of imperial arrangements, speaks clearly and frankly to a void whose presence uncovers more genuine images of Danubian reality. After witnessing the gradual vanishing of the traditional subject, one becomes convinced that Magris poet(h)ical approach has its correlates not only in theories about the contemporary de-centered thought, but also in the very same geographical reality/realities that make Central Europe. Seen in the context of Danube, this final void, the tomb within the text, is almost self explanatory. The real existence of such a region, which is, in fact, a historical artifact superimposed on its inhabitants, directly depends on individuals ability to adjust and re-adjust to external forces of such obligatory history. The regions discursive place on contemporary intellectual and scholarly maps is based on the benevolence and adaptability of those scholars who are able to exercise patience and, more importantly, who are willing to dismiss their own ideologies and schemes in order to listen and understand the Danubian lands in their protean survival games. Magris journey from Kyselaks graffiti, via his humble suggestions to the archivist to inscribe first meaningless words and then simply nothing, finally arriving
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at the void of a vacated Grenadiers grave reserved for others, illustrates how the authors intellectual and narrative position deals with its topic by fully respecting all the ambiguities found in it. He is not a modernist who can summon history back to life; he is, at best, a postmodern locator of Central European culture who can designate empty tombs as monuments to past colonial narratives, not to the heroes who died for the causes they officially represent.

Voices from the outsikrts

Miroslav Krlea: Identity as a Servile Embodiment of Worthlessness Being an assistant in the court registry of Vienna, Kyselaks lives in the central region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This privilege, combined with his personality, gave him a sense of sublime isolation -- an isolation which enabled him to believe that he was not a part of that savage mass of semi-men, but rather in control of his own identity and reality. Both metaphorically and literally, Josef Kyselak lived on solid ground, and was willing to inscribe himself onto it. Perhaps because he was a landlubber, he still believed in the firmness of his self, even when confronted with the shifting waters. The narrative conditions guaranteeing his world of stability become obvious when the reader confronts his privileged anger, aimed at those masses of lower creatures whose presence pollutes his clean and predictable empire of order. The monarchy of Kyselaks times (the early nineteenth century) was a modern federate entity primarily based on law. For the people who lived in its center, especially in large urban environments, everything was arranged in advance. Before other, more marginal perspectives on Austro-Hungarian reality are introduced, let us refer briefly to another equally important document of the times, in order to elucidate the conditions that enabled Kyselaks sense of permanence and allowed him to write
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himself into a history. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig begins his autobiography10 by describing Imperial law and order: When I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security [all emphases added]. Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency, and the State itself was the chief guarantor of this stability. The rights which it granted to its citizens were duly confirmed by parliament, the freely elected representative of the people, and every duty was exactly prescribed. Our currency, the Austrian crown, circulated in bright gold pieces, an assurance of its immutability. Everyone knew how much he possessed or what he was entitled to, what was permitted and what forbidden. Everything had its norm, its definite measure and weight. He who had a fortune could accurately compute his annual interest. An official or an officer, for example, could confidently look up in the calendar the year when he would be advanced in grade, or when he would be pensioned. Each family had its fixed budget, and knew how much could be spent for rent and food, for vacations and entertainment; and what is more, invariably a small sum was carefully laid aside for sickness and the doctors bills, for the unexpected. Whoever owned a house looked upon it as a secure domicile for his children and grandchildren; estates and businesses were handed down from generation to generation. When the babe was still in its cradle, its first mite was put in its little bank, or deposited in the savings bank, as a reserve for the future. In this vast empire everything stood firmly and immovably in its appointed place, and at its head was the aged emperor; and were he to die, on knew (or believed) another would come to take his place, and nothing would change in the well-regulated order. No one thought of wars, of revolutions, or revolts. All that was radical,
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all violence, seemed impossible in an age of reason. (The World of Yesterday 2-3) Although it is hard to trust someone whose political analysis of World War II begins and ends with the claim that it was a war of brothers brought about by clumsy diplomats and brutal munitions manufacturers,11 his account should be read primarily because of Zweigs own personal sincerity in documenting the epoch. Himself a member of a privileged, higher class, and therefore unable to see the larger picture of society, Zweig is not the best source for a detailed social analysis. His optimistic views rely on an Enlightenment concept of ethics. In other words, Zweig believes that the world is stable and that Good can be learned. In such a context, without any hesitation, he identifies the Golden Age of Security as an age of reason -- his solid existence rests on ethics, logic, and, on the coherence of historical narratives. Even if one agrees to such a model of social and psychological stability in Austro-Hungary, the Imperial rationale of the Habsburgs did not resonate far from its center. Its narrative did not travel down the Danube well, or very far away from it; however, Zweig offers an insiders insight into the center of the Dual Monarchy, speaking accurately about an Empire in which everything, once launched from Vienna toward the peripheries, was again reflected inward from the provinces back to the center. Zweigs candid testimony tells a story only about the powerful part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although such a one-dimensional document speaks from a privileged insiders viewpoint, it helps to articulate another perspective, the perspective of outsiders, of the peoples from the borderlands -- from the southern and eastern edges of the Monarchy, whose security is yet to be found. The question guiding further analysis of identity problems in Central Europe must also include those peoples in its discursive universe who never knew of such predictable things as permanency, stability, assurance, and well-regulated order. To understand other literatures, especially the literatures from the margins (especially Krlea, Haek, and Kafka, for instance) one must ask: what was
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life like in the more far-flung Habsburg lands of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where nothing was stable, firm, immovable, fixed and secure, and where everything was immutable, spontaneous, insecure and unexpected? What was daily existence like in the lands such as Czech, or Slovakia, Slovenia, or Croatia, where almost nothing was permitted, but where, in consequence, everything was forbidden, where those Kyselaks stupid masses did not have problems about where to vacation or how to entertain themselves--where everything was just a survival game? Those countries without definite measures or regulated orders, where no one was entitled to anything, but where everybody was obliged to serve His Imperial and Royal Majesty, were important parts of Central Europe whose centripetal colonial dynamics had an aged emperor at its head. In order to renegotiate their position in accordance with Magris insistence on productive ambiguity, new analytical methods must be drawn upon, and new regional narratives introduced, to lend a voice to the underprivileged, to name their unnamed reality. In her essay Central Europe and the Nationalist Paradigm, Katherine Arens writes: Where England or France were tacitly asserting cultural and moral superiority over India and Algeria, respectively, Austro-Hungary stressed individual citizens internalization of a model of contractual hegemony, guaranteed through access to the central power, the emperor -- it was a narrative directed inward rather than outward, stressing strength in diversity rather than normativity. In a certain sense, Austro-Hungary continues the idea of a nation as a representative public sphere characterizing Enlightenment thought (a strategy carried by Metternich into Franz Josephs time from the close of the eighteen century). (Central Europe and the Nationalist Paradigm, unpublished essay) Since this essay does not discuss the aforementioned marginal lands, its explanation is legitimate: Austro-Hungary stressed
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individual citizens internalization of a model of contractual hegemony, guaranteed through access to the central power, the emperor. This produced an inward rather than the outward (England, France) colonial narrative, moreover, this essay speaks in favor of the hypothesis that, despite the different modes of colonization used by the different empires (England and France versus Austro-Hungary), large parts of Central Europe remained someone elses colonial properties. As in the previous example, one should note that this narrative is aimed elsewhere, and, instead of criticizing its one-dimensional approach, compare its model of the center to the situation on the cultural, political and geographical margins of the Monarchy addressed here. Completing that comparison, the conclusion can be applied to the remote landscapes of the small peoples who still belong to Austro-Hungary. In other words, neither Arens nor Zweig claim that they are giving a complete picture of the entire Monarchy, and both of them are right when they say that the situation in Austro-Hungary was complicated, but stable. That is: if a citizen knew how to do the paperwork, his or her business was taken care of. Since the present interpretation is specifically interested in the peoples of lesser gods on the peripheries of that imperial center, it adds its voice to previous statements about the lived realities in that historical space, especially for people like Svejk who could never get his discharge papers issued properly, since Austro-Hungarys center kept changing the rules imposed on him. Yes, law and order work throughout the region, and they do operate on the principles of an inwardly-directed dynamics: this is not in question. The problem is how to reconcile this benevolent hegemonism with the situation on the imperial peripheral fringes, because the pattern offered for Austro-Hungary worked only if a citizen was a citizen, and it certainly worked best if s/he either lived in or were able to come to Vienna. This, however, does not mean that similar situations existing in Budapest, or Prague, or in Zagreb were beyond assistance. It is hard to overlook the large parts of the Monarchy whose inhabitants were seen in the capital (and other less glamorous centers) only as those silenced by Kyselakpeoples de159

prived of their voice and of their chances for accessing mainstream administration, strangers to the language that bound the system together, peoples without their elementary right to be at least equivalent to others among the purportedly equal citizens of a large federal state based on objective law and order. To understand the reality of those lands on the margins of Habsburg hegemony, where, unlike in Zweigs safe nostalgia, everyone had to think of wars and revolutions and where everything was always in revolt, one must assume the position of the outsider and hear the testimony of an author from one of the underrepresented national, social, political and cultural groups of the Empire. The Croatian writer Miroslav Krlea (1893-1982) examplifies a titanic intellectual figure trapped in a small language and a provincial culture. Krleas writings illustrate the unique and difficult position of marginal cultures or minor literatures whose textual documents (such as Kafkas and Haeks) cross the immediate borders of their environment and become integral parts of the mainstream history of the world narratives.12 In his book Deset krvavih godina (Ten Years Soaked in Blood),13 and particularly in a section entitled Teze za jednu diskusiju iz godine 1935 (Theses for a Discussion from the Year 1935), Krlea directly comments on the position of Croatia in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy14: The statement, You are ante murale Christianitatis15 does not only refer to us, the Croats. It has repeatedly been said to all the miserable national catholic commoners who lived on the Danube and the Visla--to the poor devils who have been dying on the bloody frontiers of European profits. We have been dying while, at the center of civilization they were feasting at drinking exactly as the Bishop Ianus Pannonius described it. The fact that we bled to the last drop on the ramparts of Western Civilization, fighting for foreign kings, has always been told from the Austrian perspective (from 1527 to its defeat in 1918). Today when someone is repeating in the press the most banal compliments from foreigners about our local costume balls or
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beautiful ladies from Zagreb. We brag about those remarks, and we quote these stupid lies with pride and thus sink to the rock bottom of our primitive provincial self-awareness. Our mind slavishly wags its tail while confronting those pages, and childishly, through self-humiliation, proves that we are exactly what we do not want to be: a servile embodiment of worthlessness. Alas, how many times I have heard or read about my poor self: that I am an internationalist renegade, and that I hate Croatia and everything Croatian, although I dont know any other Croatian poet who would be more popular than I am, anyone who wrote more variations on the subject of the suppressed awareness of the Croatian national essence. In Belgrade, Serbian journalists (chauvinists and separatists) attack me, calling me a supporter of Frank.16 The other day, Serbian Literary Voice accused me of Croatocentrism, when they dont know that for years I have yearned for my Serbocentric counterpart to appear in Belgrade press...*
* Da smo Antermurale Christianitatis, to nisu govorili samo nama, nego i svim nacionalnim bijedama katolikim na Dunavu i na Visli, koje su ginule na krvavoj predstrai evropskih interesa, dok se u centru civilizacije banilo na vlas tako, kao to je to opjevao Jan Panonije, biskup peujski. Da smo krvarili na braniku civilizacije zapadnoevropske, u bitkama za inostrane kraljeve do posljednje kapi krvi, o tome se pisalo iz austrijske perspektive sve do sloma Austrije (1527-1918), a danas, kada se pretampavaju najbanalniji komplimenti stranaca o naim kostimiranim balovima ili o lijepim zagrebakim gospo icama, mi se hvalisavim citiranjem tih glupih lai onog najnieg stepena provincijalne zatucane svijesti, na kome nam pamet mae repom pred stranicama ropski servilno, djetinjasto nesvijesno, dokazujui svojim ponienjem kako smo upravo ono sto neemo da budemo - servilno otjelotvorenje bezvrijednosti. O, koliko sam puta uo i itao o svojoj malenkosti da sam internacionalistiki odrod i da mrzim hrvatstvo, premda ne poznajem me u hrvatskim poetima ni jednoga koji bi bio narodniji od mene i ni jednog koji je vie varirao temu o potisnutoj svijesti hrvatskog narodnog osjeaja. U Beogradu me beogradski novinari (oveni i separatisti) napadaju kao frankovca, a nedavno mi je Srpski knjievni glasnik predbacio kroatocentrino dranje premda ve godinama eznem za svojim pandanom u Beogradskoj tampi... (Deset krvavih godina 120-121)

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This excerpt from a larger essay17, published shortly after 1924, but written after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, is conceived around several binary oppositions which, according to the author, need to be renegotiated and possibly annihilated. Krleas dual position is obvious from his operative scheme, one which rests on a simple division between us and them, just as is at play in colonial narratives. At the beginning of the text, the author states that we have been dying, exhausted, anonymous and objectified, on their frontiers, bleeding for their profits. This all-encompassing division between such an internal us, the members of an under-represented ethnic and cultural community (and in most cases, a social one,18 as well), and an extrinsic them (their majesties, their emperors and/or kings, with their interests and agendas) frames a most pronounced set of confrontations between the oppressors and the oppressed. This set of problems is most pronounced because, as will be shown, this dichotomy represents only one possible division among others that determine the Croatian version of a Central European identity. Although, like Zweig, Krlea has his initial limited and limiting class perspective (he is from a middle-class family with its roots in provincial Croatian plebes, yet on its way to becoming urbanized), his rebellious Marxist and mainly socialist viewpoint helped him to grasp the implications of social strata on a larger scale. In his other texts, Krlea did not hesitate to address some of the most prominent oppressors of marginalized lands in general, and of Croatian people, in particular. One of the greatest despots of the region, Franz Joseph19 for instance, is usually (on the national level) recognized as a personification of the imperial, colonial rule that Austria (and later, Austro-Hungary) exercised successfully in Krleas Croatia. As an exponent of the absolutist militarism of the Monarchy, Franz Joseph was seen as a colonial and imperial oppressor of the political and social ideas of his citizens. Krleas negative attitude toward His Imperial Majesty can be found in almost all of his writings. Franz Joseph is seen as a symbol, an illustration, and an object of ironic, sarcastic or malicious remarks. Commenting on the Imperial character, for instance, Krlea
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clarifies his negative and hostile feelings not only regarding the Emperors person and performance, but also toward the institution of the Monarchy. In his travelogue Izlet u Madarsku (A Trip to Hungary [1947]), he writes: That old pharaoh was as stupid as an ordinary postman in the small provincial town of Brinje, or any other chicken from a customs office (12). Without any deeper analysis of his character, Krlea also mentions Franz Joseph in the novellas from the collection Hrvatski bog Mars (The Croatian God Mars),20 in the saga of the Glembay family,21 and in his largest novel, Zastave (Banners [1967]). In Krleas political writings, Franz Joseph is mentioned in the book Deset krvavih godina. He also appears in some of Krleas essays: Eppur si muove, O Kranjevievoj lirici, (On Kranjevis Poetry), Uspomeni Karla Krausa (Karl Kraus: In memoriam), and in his travel writings, Tri pisma iz Bea (Three Letters from Vienna) and Izlet u Madarsku (A Trip to Hungary). His main sketch of the Emperors portrait was given in Deset krvavih godina (1924). Franz Josephs imperial attitude toward Croatia is presented with humor: The name of the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia, in his Majestys Ceremonial Royal Title, is usually mentioned as its seventh subtitle . . . (In Extremis [1924]). Not just Franz Joseph, but also other representatives of that hegemony (the highest agencies that epitomize the alien them), such as Bach22 and Hdervary,23 were demonized in Krlea s writings. Although he does not hide his disgust toward Bachs absolutist rule, whose dynamics confirmed the colonial presence of the Dual Monarchy in Croatia, Krlea refuses to ascribe any particular importance to this dark period. In his essay Eppur si muove,24 Krlea believes that the period between 1849 and 1859 is inaccurately termed absolutism. According to his ideas, it was nothing but a normal and logical continuation of the four-hundred-year-long-absolutism which has not been interrupted since the sixteenth century (14). Everything that the world between the two World Wars knew about Croatia was, in fact, written and interpreted from the Austrian perspective (Deset, 120). Not only between the wars, but also between 152725 and 1918. Austrian colonial presence26 in Croatia can
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be divided into two main periods, before and after the Ausgleich. The Croatian version of an equal integration under the law (Nagodba) came one year later, in 1868. Tired of the centuries-old battle for their language and culture and for their right to represent themselves within the Austrian empire, Croatians believed that this contract with new Austrian allies, Magyars, would enable them to secure their own voice within the Monarchy. Although the echoes of a new pan-Slavic movement, Illyrian rebirth (Ilirski preporod), with its emphasis on a Croatian national language and on a new, broader scale of the future Yugoslavian cultural identity, did emerge and eventually endanger the hegemony of Austria and Hungary, Croatia still remained a country mastered by others.27 In addition to the imposition of an external them over their country, Croatian reality had other, more sophisticated methods of self-humiliation. What Austrians and Hungarians used to do officially before World War I, Austrian, Hungarian, German, Italian and other tourists did in the interwar years when Krleas lament was written. Historically devastated by almost a thousand years of oppression (from 1102 up to date), Croatians still suffer from the problem of not establishing a collective identity, seen here as their slavish mentality, their servile manner of self-denial in front of strangers. The Croatian mind, according to Krlea, slavishly wags its tail (...) and childishly, through self-humiliation, proves that [they are exactly what they do not want to be]: a servile embodiment of worthlessness (Deset 121). Objectified and denied, through their humiliated political, social and individual identities, Croatians have thus been deprived of a meaningful language that could communicate the complexity of their situation and allow their distinctive subject positions to emerge. Exhausted in a thousand years long occupation and colonization, Croatians of today, in spite of varieties of applied and historically modified opportunities for self-determinations along with seemingly benign self-occupations, still encounter serious problems whenever it comes to their self-definition (whether it is an individual or collective self-recognition). What Krlea recognizes as a self-humiliating reaction to yet another primitive provincial self-awareness in front of which our mind slavishly wags its
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tail proving that we are exactly what we do not want to be: a servile embodiment of worthlessness, (17) citizens of Croatia see as a historic norma self-explanatory behavioral model that belongs to a slavish mentality evident in their ways of communicating with strangers that result in self-humiliation of their individual and collective selves. Reified and negated in a labyrinth of their owna labyrinth of their individual and collective identities, whether they be particles of social, political and/or cultural strata, Croatians are still on a mission to find an effective and precise terminology that would communicate identity politics liberated from outdated tribal emotions and Nineteenth century patriotism based on ethnic and political exclusivity. An objectivity and precision of such a vocabulary would enable a cultural construction of new subjectivity that could define them in positive terms. Such new identity constructs would not depend exclusively on how do others view them. They would not relay on bad authenticity according to which I is not defined positively but in relation to others, usually in relation to ethnic and ideological neighbors perceived as non-I, as an object of comparison that becomes an imaginary measurement for dislocated notions of self. Those others are either idealized tourists who compliment and exoticize our sense of self, and, in so doing, externally define our identity perceiving us as self-satisfying and self-satisfied objects, or again, they represent our dislocated concept of the West as a monolith in whose mirror, hoping for recognition, we desperately look for our reflection. Those others are also our neighbors whose shortcomings encourage us in our own identity search. As far as the latter are concerned, they are too much like us for us to embrace them as ours, because how can we admit that us, just like them, slavishly wag their tail and thus remind us of each other in a distorted mirror of the Balkans? Therefore, in order to avoid yet another devastating identification, instead of re-constructing our own sense of self, we find our satisfaction in looking for our identity as a projection onto others. To repeat an earlier statement, we, moreover, celebrate the fact that we are everything what our neighbors failed to become. And for that reason it is hard to hope for a positive answer when asked a seemingly simple question: what does it mean
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to be Croatian, without involving others and putting them in their place using unjustified methodology of superiority. This tragic historical and cultural deprivation Krlea sees as the result of the imposed colonial politics producing an existential condition which he calls morally subcolonial (122). Other, more immanent divisions on a smaller scale also acknowledge at least two parallel groups of us and them which operate in the Austro-Hungarian space of the Danubian basin and its surroundings. Krlea had been accused of internationalism in Croatia by some better and bigger Croatsby those who believe that Croatianess can and ought to be measured usually assuming that they are the proper unit for that measure. He had been called a renegade who hates Croatia and everything Croatian. Since his relation with the idea of the suppressed awareness of the Croatian national being will be discussed in the following chapter, for the moment the emphasis will remain on the multiple identities available to a subject whose historical destiny is to share the same subcolonial space with others whose otherness does not always come from the outside. Not only conservative Croats, but also nationalist Serbs (the Serbian critics whom Krlea calls chauvinists and separatists) will attack the writer whose cosmopolitan views sound too dangerous, too progressive, too different to be accepted by the majority of those colonized minds. Speaking in terms of this analysis, his identity has gone too far into flux, away from official and recognizable historical narratives, regardless of their relation with the Imperial and other imagined centers. Trapped between external centripetal influences and internal centrifugal ethnic, cultural and ideological divisions in this way, Krlea thus has a difficult task to accomplish to establish his identity in this space. In order to represent the underrepresented and communicate his preferred social messages, he first has to establish his own identity, as a writer, thinker, intellectual, and exposed public figure whose omnipresent persona is marked in the annals of twentieth-century European literature. His identity was multiple. Viewed from the outside, from the Central Europe of Svevo, Joyce, Kundera, Musil, and others, Krlea must first become a minor writer, in
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Deleuzes and Guattaris meaning of the term -- an articulated voice from the periphery of Central Europe, a rebel and a provincial institution from the utmost southern edges of the Danubian landscapes. Or perhaps he simply has to take on the role of some new and more articulated Kyselak whose letters were literary and therefore the only tool that has remained in the defense of our human pride.28 For Croatian and Yugoslavian cultures, Krlea actually became the kind of monument that Magris Kyselak wanted to become: a member of a hegemony who created a history for the peripheral cultures of Europe, but also a writer with his own authority, who could himself silenced many other potential voices from his immediate environment, the voices of those fellow writers, whose presence he considered potentially dangerous to his personal vision of the independent development of Croatian literature in process of asserting its own identity at the margins of Europe and Central Europe. He promoted and actually even fabricated Croatian and Yugoslavian realities to the extent that, nowadays, in those small circles where one in fact receives a response whenever Croatia or Yugoslavia are mentioned, s/he hears nothing more than Krleas name, which in many cases stands for the entirety of Croatian literature known to the West and the East. Yet behind Kyselaks name there is already a void, a phantasmal space of absence, a deleted history reflecting the remains of a writers singular desire to be engraved in the collective memory of Central Europe. Behind Kyselak lay the firmly-centered imperial order of Austro-Hungary; however, that same imperial order, in Krleas case, led his world of the periphery into chaos rather than into stability. Unlike Kyselak, then, Krlea had to fight to emancipate his name from its individual anonymity, from the anonymity of his culture(s) within the larger body of dominant Central European cultural puzzle, and (perhaps the most difficult task) from the hostile political and cultural environment created by those Croatian and Serbian literary critics who would have remained anonymous if their paths had not crossed Krleas. In spite of his geocultural and historical limitations, Krlea became an intellectual with agency, like Magris and Kundera, for instance, and his voice did partial167

ly resemble voices of those Central European postcolonial cultural critics from more visible historical margins. Behind Krleas name still lies buried an entire silent, well-hidden world -- a world that, once entered, can tell more stories about lost identities that Magris could, and one that can explain its marginal existence within the remnants of the Monarchy. In fact, some of those silent voices came into being after Krlea introduced them to the readers and to cultural analysts. Unfortunately, many of them were silenced by his intrinsic master narrative. Yet bearing in mind the extreme complexity of the situation, we must now turn to examine directly Krleas crucial role in shaping the landscapes of southern and eastern Central Europe from his subcolonial position as non-dominant within a non-dominant sphere of culture and history.

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For the opening argument of this chapter, I am using Bhabhas essay Postcolonial Criticism (in Redrawing the Boundaries, eds. Greenblatt and Gunn [New York: MLA, 1992] 437-465); however, my application of postcolonialism, as well as my appropriation of other of Bhabhas writings, does not limit itself to the arguments quoted in the introduction. My further analysis offers different understandings of colonial discourse, especially as it relates to Central European cultural, political and ideological space as Western. Homi Bhabha, Postcolonial Criticism, in Redrawing the Boundaries, eds. Greenblatt and Gunn (New York: MLA, 1992) 437-465. For the traditional model of colonizing the other (Anglo-or Frankophone methods), whose dynamics are aimed from the center to the outside, I will introduce the term centrifugal colonization. Other modes, like for example one employed by the Habsburgs in Central Europe, because of their nature, I will call centripetal: their colonial discourse was aimed inward; from the provinces back to the emperor. For more on the relation between semiology or semantics and colonial conquest, see particularly Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America; Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme; Edward Said, Orientalism; and Roberto Retamar, Cliban. The real Josef Kyselak wrote two books of travel sketches describing his Danubian journeys. Using the same arrogant style that he attributes to Kyselak, Magris dismisses these writings, proclaiming them worthless. For more on positive treatment of so-called negative categories see: Plotinus, Enneades, and (as representative of his many works) E. Swedenborgs Concerning Heaven and its Wonders, and Concerning Hell; Of Things Heard and Seen. As explained by Lubomir Dolezel, the distinction between ontic and deontic refers to two different possible worlds. To secure the modal existence of the fictional characters, Dolezel suggests the terminology in which term ontic deals with the real world (the one which traditional literary theory and philosophy of literature calls extraliterary, extratextual world see especially Russian Formalists and Prague Linguists) and deontic with the world of fiction. This terminology is meant to facilitate the discussion about the existence of fictional characters. Dolezels contribution in arguing modes of fictional existence is important, because his treatment of truth theories of fiction does not insist on referential understandings of truthfulness. As he argues: although the characters do not exist in the traditional, referential sense, they are (in their own world). The truth value (the existence) of such a world is not based upon its referential relation to something outside the text, but is organized on the principles of inner plausibility. The idea of trans-rational discourse (glossolalia, or in Russian, jazikogovorenije; speaking in tongues) attracted Russian avant-garde artists who desired to escape their turbulent reality and to introduce a language from the beyond; they were

2 3

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led to recycle an old national mystical tradition to achieve this end. Aside from the effective linguistic experiments which added creative flavor to the new theoretical achievements of Russian Formalism and Prague Linguistic School, these poets also offered a sharp critique of the totalitarian and ideologically-charged language of the pre-Revolutionary and the Revolutionary epochs. 9 This linguistic manner started as a language from the beyond, introduced by the Russian Medieval mystics whose original inspiration is found in the holy scriptures and Kabbalah.

10 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1964). 11 This sentence is taken from the introduction to the Bison Book Edition of Zweigs autobiography. The author, Harry Zohn, calls it a one-dimensional oversimplification (The World of Yesterday ix). 12 The term minor literature is used in the sense established in their essay What is a Minor Literature in: Reading Kafka, ed. Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken Books, 1989) 80-94. 13 A book of essays published in Zagreb in 1937. Although almost all the essays had previously been published in periodicals Knjievna Republika (Literary Republic) and Knjievnik (The Author) between 1924 and 1928, the book was immediately confiscated by the State Court (The Royal Court of The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats And the Slovenes). Due to some connections Krlea had among people in the legal system in that First Yugoslavia, detectives managed to destroy only a hundred copies of his book. Since after that initiative the book naturally disappeared from the market, Krleas publisher had to arrange alternative plans. A slightly different (expanded) version of the book was planned for the fall of 1940 but was only published in the Second Yugoslavia, seventeen years latter (in 1957). Its new title was Deset krvavih godina i drugi politiki eseji (Ten Years Soaked in Blood And Other Political Essays). Deset krvavih godina is a summation of Krleas political ideas, his analysis of the important cultural and political figures and events written in very hard times for modern Croatian, Yugoslavian and European history. In his book, he writes of the problems that interested him in his lifetime: all the aspects of the Croatian national and political questions, so-called retarded mentalities in Croatian reality, and his understanding of history. He also examined the possibilities of taking action in history, the question of the identity of the Southern Slavs, Serbo-Croatian relations, and (very important) his understanding of a national question as a social one. Krlea understood that it is impossible to constitute a nation state in the Balkans-- a state whose main criterion is a nationhood defined with ethnicity seen in a mythical, anachronistic and exclusivistic context. Krlea treated the national question as a matter of a state organization (not only among the Croats, but also among the other groups who inhabit the Southern Slavic lands and the Balkans).

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His book (either celebrated or condemned) is probably one of the most controversial books in Croatian political literature. Initially meant to cover only the period between 1914 and 1924, this book in its final version contained all the important events that took place between the two World Wars. In closing arguments written in 1953, in times of Yugoslavian Socialist Realism, as he said, Krlea wrote about the topics in a serious manner, just like one writes on green tables of the tribunals. The questions he raises and the analysis he undertakes will remain the main reference points in any future approach to the national, historical or social destiny of the citizens of Croatia. 14 The extract quoted is drawn from the section entitled O malogradjanskoj ljubavi spram hrvatstva (On petit-bourgeois love for Croationhood). This section is a part of a larger essay, Nekoliko rijei o malogra anskom historizmu uope (A Few Words on a petit bourgeois Historicism in General), originally published in periodicals between 1924 and 1928 under the so-called Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and later as a segment of the book Deset krvavih godina (Zagreb: DMK BNP, 1937). 15 The bulwark of Christianity: term used by the Christian sacral hegemony which included predominantly Croatian territories, since The Turkish invasion (Sixteenth century). 16 Josip Frank: the Croatian ultra-nationalist whose popular and militant movement from the beginning of the century represented the most conservative and exclusivistic politics from the Croatian right. 17 If not otherwise indicated, all translations from Croatian are my own. 18 Here I will be looking predominantly at Krleas early writings (most of them written between the two World Wars), whose fictional and factional focus is on the most oppressed layers of the society: society on the margins of the Habsburg Monarchy, whose legacy after its decline and physical disappearance (1918) remained very vividly present in former imperial lands. 19 In Croatian, Franjo Josip I, Austrian emperor. From 1867 emperor and the king of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. A member of the Habsburg-Lothringen dynasty (b. Vienna, 08/18/1830; d. Vienna, 11/21/1916), he became the emperor in December 1848, after the collapse of the uprising in Vienna. With the assistance of imperial troops, Franz Joseph managed to defeat the Hungarian revolutionaries (1849) and in 1851 proclaimed a centralist and absolutist regime conducted by the Austrian minister of the Interior Affairs, A. Bach. Such absolutism (known as Bachs absolutism) insisted on a pronounced and often brutal Germanization of the Slavic peoples, among them the Croats. After defeats in the Austro-Italian and Austro-Prussian wars 1866, Franz Joseph proclaimed the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. After the Ausgleich/Compromise in 1867, announced in Budim, but without consent of the Croatian parliament, Franz Joseph was crowned the Hungaro-Croatian king. On his insistence, in 1868, Croats and Hungarians signed a political contract known as Hrvatsko-Ugarska nagodba. Although Croatia was promised local

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self-rule and cultural autonomy, this contract turned out to be a devastating one for Croatian reality. In fact, Croatia simply traded masters: what used to be Austrian subsequently became Hungarian, and this Magyar dominance determined Croatias social and political development (or underdevelopment) for the following 50 years. After the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (organized by the Serbian terrorist organization Black Hand and executed by its member, Gavrilo Princip) in 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its ally Germany, declared war on Serbia (the beginning of the W.W.I). Franz Joseph died in 1916, approximately two years before the final Austro-Hungarian defeat. 20 In the novella Smrt Florijana Kranjeca (The Death of Florian Kranjec). 21 Krlea s saga of the Glembay family is a monumental testimony to modern Croatian history. Glembajevi (The Glembays) is a large literary corpus (3 plays and 11 novellas -- Krlea usually refers to the latter as the fragments). The texts were written and first published in the famous Minerva edition in Zagreb between 1926 and 1930. As a complete collection that contains all the fourteen narratives, Glembajevi appeared in two volumes in 1945 (Glembajevi I; Glembajevi II [ Zagreb: Suvremena Naklada]). The aforementioned narratives had originally been published in other forms Gospoda Glembajevi (The Glembays) (Zagreb: 1928); U Agoniji (In The Agony) (Zagreb: Hrvatska revija, 19028, 1-2). As a book it appeared in Belgrade in 1931. Leda was published in fragments in the following periodicals: Knjievnik, 11 (1929); SKG, (Srpski knjievni glasnik) 1 (1930); Savremenik (1931: 12-13.); O Glembajevima, in SKG (1928: 5-6); and Knjievnik (1929: 5); Kako je doktor Gregor prvi put u ivotu susreo neastivoga (How Did Dr. Gregor Meet the Devil for the First Time). Further listings: Knjievnik (1929: 5) Sprovod u Teresienburgu (A Funeral in Teresienburg). Savremenik, 1929, 2-3; Ljubav Marcela Faber-Fabriczyja za gospo icu Lauru Warroniggowu (Marcels Fabriczys Love for Miss Laura Warronig): part one in Savremenik (1928, 11); part two, Pantheon, (1929, 2); U magli (In the Mist), Savremenik (1928); Ivan Kriovec, part one in Knjievna republika (1926, 4-5); part two in Savremenik (1928, 1); Barunica Leinbachova (Countess Leinbach), Savremenik (1927, 12); Pod maskom (Behind the Mask) Savremenik, 1927 (12); Svadba velikog upana Klanfara (The Marriage of the Grand Parish Klanfar). Knjievnik (1929, 9); and Klanfar na Varadijevu, Knjievnik (1930, 1). Gospoda Glembajevi, Leda , and U Agoniji are the theater plays. As a whole, the Glembay narrative is the axis of Krleas work completed after he finished all of his novellas, which had focused on the isolated individuals and their encounters with various manifestations of Nothingness (originally collected in the book Hiljadu i jedna smrt, 1001 Death). His very last writings on the Glembays have been published at the time when Krlea was already working on his novel Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (The Return of Filip Latinovicz) (1930-1932).

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Krleas narrative technique in the Glembay saga departed from the individual focal points that belonged to a singular character, and so instead stressed the importance of a collective conscience. His new focal points were carefully distributed among the groups of individuals with different perspectives, narrative functions and personal goals demonstrated within the large body of such a fictional discourse. Aside from this polyphony, the Glembays were governed by their global ideology (a provincial magnates who cannot overcome his almost innate petite bourgeois viewpoints). A very powerful family from Zagreb (Agram) undergoes a set of tragedies which are the combination of their inherited vital energy and social power whose rise and fall is described in Krleas opus. Writing on the Glembays, Krlea discusses the correlation between the seeds of the industrial society in Croatia (early twentieth century), which tried to establish itself upon the archaic basis of the late feudal and subcolonial (a term often used by Krlea, which will be discussed in the following chapter) ideologies of the Habsburg and post-Habsburg era. Seen in the context of the authors intentions, Glembays may be compared to Manns Buddenbrooks, or Galsworthys Forsythes. However, their positioning as provincial capitalists in a society without any kind of infra-structure makes them look ridiculous compared to the aforementioned fictional dynasties. Glembajevi is thus a crucial cultural document which speaks of the influence of European Naturalism and fin de sicle Secessionism on Croatian literature (more precisely, on Krleas own shaping of mainstream culture and aesthetic taste). These three plays are very much written under the influence of Ibsen and Strindberg. Like Zola and Galsworthy, Krlea manufactured a fictitious family, which Glembays, whose characteristics (in terms of the authors modes of interpretation) stress the important historical existential dimension. Like in these three theater plays, in Krleas narratives, the Glembays live as representatives of unfulfilled, unrealized potentials. Their illusion of wholeness is just a part of the contemporary game between perception the fantasy, the game that philosophically and aesthetically (at least for a while) has replaced Realism with the open modes of the Modernist Symbolism. 22 The time under Bachs cruel regime, Krlea offers what we call today : The Era of Tyranny. He clearly states that all the Croats of the time were in prison. 23 Khuen Hdervary, Kroly (b. Freudenthal, 05/23/1849 - d. Budapest, 02/16/1918), the Viceroy of Croatian provinces of Slavonia and Dalmatia between 1883 and 1903. His presence in Croatia symbolizes the epoch of Hungarian repression. Born during Hdervarys rule, Krlea speaks of him as a: Hungarian Count who always spoke of Croatians as a hungry, vulgar sub-species, as a scum that needs to be treated like all the mule-drivers (EK 454). Krlea characterizes Hdervarys autocracy as a clear attempt to colonize Croatia, seen by the oppressors an a backward land of primitive peasants. (Sources: Moja ratna lirika, Evropa danas (My War Poetry, Europe Today ) [Zagreb: SDMKZ, Vol. 13, 1956] and 99 varijacija [99 Variations] [Beograd: 1972]).

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24 In: Djetinjstvo 1902-03, i drugi zapisi (Childhood, 1902-03 and Other Writings) Vol. 27 (Zagreb: SDMKZ, 1972). 25 When, after the election in the Croatian Parliament, a Habsburg monarch had been elected to rule Croatian provinces for the first time. 26 Hungarian rule over Croatian territories (from 1102 after signing the Pacta Conventa between the Croatian noble families and the Hungarian royalty represented in an autocratic and powerful figure of their king Koloman to 1527, and then in the dual monarchy 1867-1918) will be discussed in chapter four. 27 For more complete account on Southern Central Europes history in English see: Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1984), Ralph Bogert, The Writer as Naysayer: Miroslav Krlea and the Aesthetic of Interwar Central Europe (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, Inc., 1991), Francis Dvornik, The Making of Central and Eastern Europe (London: The Polish Research Centre, 1949), Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920: A History of East Central Europe. Vol. 8. (Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 1977), Robert A. Kann, and Zdenek V. David, The Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918: A History of East Central Europe. Vol. 6. (Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 1984), Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History (New York: St. Martin Press, 1993), Regina Cowen Karp, Central and Eastern Europe: The Challenge of Transition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), Stjepan Gabriel Mestrovic, The Bakanization of the West: The Confluence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe Between the Two World Wars: A History of East Central Europe. Vol. 9. (Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 1974), Peter Stirk, Mitteleuropa: History and Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1994), Peter F. Sugar, Southeastern Europe Under Ottoman Rule, 1354-1804: A History of East Central Europe. Vol. 8. (Seattle and London: U of Washington P, 1977), Piotr S. Wandycz, The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 28 In his novel Banket u Blitvi (A Banquet in Blitva) (Zagreb: 1938), Krlea writes: A box of letters: its not much, but it is the only tool left in the defense of our human pride (3).

Chapter 4: Miroslav Krleas Colonial Motifs

That familiar feeling of defeatism while secretly hoping for the collapse of everything that exists in the form of foreign rule, coincides with suppressed national awareness and, as such, barely exists in the morally subcolonial circumstances of a man who travels third class on the Hungarian State Railway, in the Hungarian State Machine, with Hungarian tax stamps and with its administration which is constantly, he feels, hostile. That feeling kneels slavishly in other peoples anterooms, transforming itself into the moral monsters of upper-level bank officialsusually referred to as: most esteemed, or ordinarius, or rector magnificus and helplessly hates Hungarian mailboxes (...) That hatred erupts again like the hatred of a declasse proletarian -- of a poor peasant. It is a hatred aimed toward foreign flags, foreign Styrian, Tyrolian, and Hungarian march battalions; and it resembles the voice of that proletarian who, in 1914, in front of the university, as in some kind of delirium, started to curse the Hungarian soldiers on their way to the Serbian front. That feeling has nothing to do with reality! It floats above reality, not too high, and is permanently passively resistant toward everything that represents any form of organized foreign rule. It is a kind of non-conformist
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feeling for everything that came to this country by crossing its borders! (Ten Years Soaked in Blood 518)* In his vignette1, Colonial Motives, Miroslav Krlea depicts the so-called sub-colonial conditions that determined the reality of Croatia after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867. The Compromise created the Dual Monarchy, and, as Claudio Magris sees it from his mainstream Central European perspective, remedied the most serious of Austrian wounds in the late Nineteenth century: it staved off the Hungarian Separatist movement. The Compromise enabled the Hungarians to practice their rebellious and nationalist sentiments within the limits of law, converting a potentially serious Austrian enemy into a powerful ally. Such a political move, in which Austria and Hungary united as partners in ruling over Central Europe, was yet another proof of the Habsburgs art of hegemony--the art of a political dominance which does not annihilate the ethnic diversity of the empire, but rather undermines the possibility of unilateral national explosions by playing out a game of equality, in which each and every ethnicity has its place under the Emperors throne. The Habsburgs mastered the art of national manipulation by leaving the ethnicities alone in their individual relationships with
* Prieljkujui trajno slomove svega to postoji kao tuinska vlast, taj defetistiki osjeaj, koji se podudara s potisnutom nacionalnom svijeu, ivotari u moralno supkolonijalnim prilikama, i ondje vegetira u svijesti ovjeka, koji putuje treim razredom madarske dravne eljeznice, madarskog dravnog stroja, s madarskim biljezima i administracijom, za koju osjea svakodnevno da mu je neprijateljska. Osjeaj taj ropski se klanja po tuinskim predsobljima, pretvarajui se u moralne nakaze viih, bankosavjetnikih karijera, koje se onda zovu presvijetli ili ordinarius ili rector magnificus, ili bespomono mrzi madarske kutije za pisma (...) taj osjeaj provaljuje kao mrnja deklasiranog proletera, opanka, seljakog siromaha, protiv tuinskih barjaka, tuinskih tajerskih, tirolskih i madarskih marbataljona, kao glas onoga proletera godine 1914, kada je pred sveuilitem, kao u deliriju, poeo da psuje majku madarskim vojnicima, koji se kreu na srbijansko ratite. Taj osjeaj nije vezan za stvarnost! On lebdi iznad stvarnosti na ne pretjerano velikoj visini i on je trajno pasivno rezistentan spram svega to predstavlja bilo kakvu formu organizirane tuinske vlasti nonkonformizam spram svega to je doputovalo u ovu zemlju preko granice! (Deset 518 Kolonijalni motivi)

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the Viennese Court and, to some extent, by respecting their sovereign status, while at the same time directing all of their differences against each other. The protean status of Franz Joseph presents the best performance imitating a ruler, a role he plays in the spectacle of governing the equally protean Central European region. Although all the reins of power were ultimately in the emperors hands, the nations under the Austrian crown had a respectable degree of independence in their mutual interactions. They were organized in a colonial model in which all the aggression and subversive dynamics of repressed were aimed at complicating the interactions among the colonized tribes, instead of being focused against the oppressor, the Monarchy. In describing the melting pot of the Dual Monarchy after the Compromise with its newly canonized Hungarian patriotic feelings, Claudio Magris writes, The nationalistic passion of the Magyars, which runs with heroic and ferocious fury all through Hungarian History, is born from a land in which wave after wave of invasions and immigrations, Huns and Avars, Slavs and Magyars, Tartars and Kumans, Jazigs and Pechenegs, Turks and Germans are superimposed and deposited one upon another in layer after layer. The migrations of peoples bring devastation, but also civilization, like the Turks, who not only brought plunder but also the culture of Islam. They produce mixtures, the secret roots of every nationalism and its obsession with ethnic purity, as in the legend of the Hunnish origin of the Hungarians. Janus Pannonius, the fifteenth-century poet and humanist, was of Croatian origin, as was the aristocratic family of the Zrny, which fathered heroes and poets of the Hungarian epic. The mother of Petfi, the Magyar national poet, could not speak Hungarian, while Count Szcheny, a great patriot and father of the cultural conscience of the nation, learnt it when he was thirty-four. The symbol of the irredentist protest against the Habsburgs, the tulip which Kossuths followers wore
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in their buttonholes, is the flower brought by the Ottoman dominators and celebrated in their national poetry as an emblem of Turkish civilization. The national passion is the imperious necessity not simply to be, but-as in Mr Jkais novel The New Squire, written in the mid-nineteenth century-also to become ardent Hungarian patriots. (Danube 285)* The seemingly horizontal dynamics of a geographic redistribution of hegemony in the Austro-Hungarian Compromisewere, in fact, ased upon the sophisticated principles of a vertical colonial dominance, in which a potentially strong subaltern opponent of the Austrians, Hungary, was made their ally and set over southern Habsburg colonies. By virtue of the Ausgleich, and in spite of the nominal recognition of the Hungarian element within the dual Monarchy, a desire to assuage their wounded feeling of equality shifted the attention of the inferior Hungarians away from their superior Austrian partners, and turned them against the smaller peoples, easier objects of further colonization.

La passione nazionale magiara, che percorre con eroico e feroce furore la storia ungharese, nasce da una terra nella quale si sono stratificate, mescolate e depositate ondate di invasioni e di stirpi diverse, unni e avari, slavi e magiari, tartari e cumani, jazigi e peceneghi, turci e tedeschi. Le migrazioni di popoli devastano, ma anche civilizzano-come i turchi, che portano non soltanto spogliazioni ma anche la cultura islamica-e producono promiscuit e mescolanza, le matrici segrete di ogni nazionalismo e delle sue ossessioni di purezza etnica, come la leggenda dellorigine unna degli ungheresi; Janus Pannonius, lumanista e poeta del XV secolo, dorigine croata, come la famiglia aristocratica degly Zrinyi, dalla quale escono eroi e cantori dellepopea ungherese; la madre di Petfi, il poeta nazionale magiaro, non sapeva lungherese e il conte Szchenyi, grande patriota e padre della coscienza culturale della nazione, lo impara a 34 anni; il simbolo della protesta irredentista contro gli Absburgo, il tulipano infilato allochiello dai seguaci di Kossuth, il fiore portato dai dominatori ottomani e celebrato nella loro poesia quale emblema della civilit turca. La passione nazionale limperiosa esigenza non solo di essere, ma, come nel romanzo Fascino magiaro di Mr Jkai, a met del secolo scorso, di diventare ardenti patrioti ungheresi . (Danubio 285)

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The Croatian situation was typical of the Habsburg-generated colonial dynamics of divide and conquer. Colonized Hungary, newly admitted within the range of equals to the court, now became the main nation in charge of already-colonized Croatia. Yet since 1521, Croatian reality was already a part of the Austrian colonial narrative; so by adding Hungary to the list of its masters after 1867, it acquired its new position, which Krlea calls sub-colonial. Seen as an Austrian colony in transition, subordinated to the Magyars, Croatia was facing fin the sicle in the role of a twice-colonized dominion. The divide and rule principle of the Habsburgs, which after World War II was successfuly adopted by Russian Communism in yet another colonization of Central Europe, manifested itself in the reactions of the proletarian described in Krleas vignette as he cursed the Hungarian soldiers on their way to the Serbian front. Such an identity loss can be seen as a diagnostic of the Croatian sub-colonial situation, because, as a member of a small ethnic family of Croatians, twice subordinated to His Imperial Majesty, that proletarian could easily join the present objects of his pan-Slavic frustration, the Hungarians, on their way to the front lines. His anger is yet another expression of the indeterminacy of causes of enslavement in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Colonized and removed from his identity, such a Croatian proletarian, as Krlea calls him, cannot recognize the colonial mechanisms of the multi-layered foreign dominance imposed on him through a new obligatory history carried out by the Empire on its way to the World War I. This self-less feeling demonstrated in the proletarian anti-Hungarian and pro-Slavic sentiments is, in fact, a modified self-hatred, successfully manipulated by the Habsburgs in their distribution of colonial presence. In Svejks version, the sense of loss and historical meaningless of their own existence inhabits the reality of every smaller tribe ruled by the Habsburgs. With their individual histories always subordinated to Other, the uncertainty of their own position and relevance in their colonial context allows for the transformations of feelings and for the conversion of individual realities at the level of regional politics. This Croatian proletarian cannot see that, by hat179

ing the Hungarians, on a sub-conscious level, he more than anything elsehates himself, his sub-colonial enslavement. He is a second-hand property of the Austrian Court, now seconded to their deputies, the Hungarians and he does not even have a clear picture why he is on the Serbian side. His pan-Slavic feeling does not reflect an articulated optimal projection for future coexistence of the Southern Central European colonies, based on equality and liberty for all. Since all he can do is curse, it is more the embodiment of passive resistance aimed against everything that stands for a foreign presence within the Croatian borders. Unable to imagine any kind of post-colonial future for the time being, he reacts to the colonial past. Aside from the personal feelings epitomized in the reaction of a proletarian described in Krleas narrative, the aftermath of the Compromise was a pact (Hrvatsko-Ugarska Nagodba) signed between the representatives of Croatia and Hungary in 1868. This pact became the constitution which regulated the relations between the two countries. Although the Nagodba has its logic in the history of Croatia,2 its consequences were devastating for a possible Croatian decolonization. Croatia was recognized as a political entity with autonomy in internal affairs, education, religious practices and the legal system. The Croatian language too was recognized as an official language in internal affairs as well as in international contacts, mainly with Hungary; however, Croatia was never granted the financial autonomy crucial for real independence. The discrepancy between the pact in verbis, and the real Croatian situation in res was large. Miroslav Krlea comments on it on many occasions; in fact, Hrvatsko-Ugarska Nagodba is one of the most frequently discussed events in his political essays. In his Theses for a Discussion from 1935 (Teze za jednu diskusiju iz godine 1935),3 Krlea characterizes the newly-achieved Croatian autonomy of 1868 in a slightly more optimistic tone. He believes that this purported autonomy played an important role in preserving some elements of the Croatian state and national specificities. Seen in the light of the earlier Compromise between Austria and Hungary, the autonomy resulting from the Nagodba is described as a link of the Habsburg colonial chain. This state of Croatian semi-autonomy,

Krlea calls the Croatian negation of the Hungarian self-negation of their desire to be a state-constructing political entity (Teze 12). In other words, after the Habsburgs have pacified the strong Hungarian state-organizing, nation-dominating, and nationalist feelings, allowing the Magyars at least to feel equal with the newly-instituted Compromise, Hungary actually just perpetuated the same colonial pattern of real subordination, now hidden behind administrative proclamations of equality. This particular outcome of the Austrian imperial presence is again part of what Krlea calls subcolonial conditions. In the appendix to his collection of novellas Hrvatski bog Mars,4 entitled: Tuma domobranskih i stranih rijei i pojmova (A dictionary of Domobran and foreign words and terms), Krlea calls the Nagodba a political contract between the Croatian noblemen and the Hungarian Counts (Hrvatski bog Mars 439) and proclaims it a fraud, a consequence of the numerous absolutist violations, imposed constitutions, and decrees dictated by the mighty foreign owners of Croatia based on cheap political tricks. Another aspect of the Nagodba, is highlighted in Krleas essay Eppur si muove, published for the first time in the periodical Plamen in 1919.5 His particular insight is of critical importance for understanding the Croato-Hungarian pact in the broader context of the nineteenth-century European politics: Krlea sees both the Austro-Hungarian Compromise and the Nagodba as two examples of a European politics of compromise meant to heal their political wounds (Eppur si muove 21). Examining the Nagodba from a closer perspective, Krlea defines it as a contract between the Hungarian aristocracy and the state regulative and political phantasmagoria of a semi-colonial Croatia, caught in the icy Habsburg moonlight(19) (dravnopravna fantastika jedne polukolonijalne Hrvatske na ledenoj habsburkoj mjeseini (19). He also believes that the 1868 pact introduced a new epoch in Croatias Austro-Hungarian enslavement. The mechanics of such an enslavement were historically clear, not only to Krlea, but to the witnesses of the late nineteenth-century Central European history. In an already-existing colonial distribution of power, the Nagodba, in which Croatia remained deprived of its fi181

nancial autonomy within the Dual Monarchy, further impoverished Croatias chances for securing its position within the world order on the eve of European decolonization. The main agency to blame for the renewed colonial role of Croatia the Viennese Court. Making a pact with the Hungarian Crown, the Austrians allowed their ally to exploit Croatia with unlimited colonial politics. Extending an analysis of the Nagodba beyond Krleas, one can observe similarity between the demographic consequences of the better-known modes of colonization, simultaneously at stake in Ireland, Africa, and India. The excessive poverty resulting from the Compromise destroyed the already weak Croatian infrastructure; therefore, shortly after 1868, thousands of Croatians had to emigrate looking for alternative means of survival. Krleas observations regarding the Nagodba predominantly date from his early phase, before and during the World War I. Then, he was a Croatian nationalist, in a positive meaning of the term, a patriot opposed to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,6 often infuriated by Croatias sub-colonial situation. Unlike the more privileged national poets of Hungary and Austria, Krleas reality was determined by Croatias marginal position within the Empire. Croatias marginality was a composite of the countrys comparatively insufficient cultural infrastructure and its subordinated status within the Monarchy. Since the aforementioned weak cultural infrastructure was not an intrinsic limitation of Croatian culture and economy, but rather a consequence of its centuries-old colonization. Krleas anti-Habsburg criticism is strong and clearly pronounced, but in spite of its contextual adequacy, his anti-imperial feelings seen from the dominant Central European perspective, can be interpreted as one-dimensional and unjust, since they focus on Austrian negative politics rather than on other, more positive aspects of Habsburg hegemony over Central Europe. Alhought there is overall improvement of the regions substructure, his feelings are justified despite the multinational structure of the Dual Monarchy and the Emperors more modern outlook on the multiethnic coexistence of the Central European peoples. However, the situation on the outskirts was slightly different than was the case at the Monarchys centers.
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Krleas loud and angry gesture was typical of a young poet who found his early aesthetic voice in European Expressionism. It had that additional and often necessary passion that usually belongs to the underprivileged and underrepresented. From his perspective, he could not see the benefits of the Monarchy, because the only reality Croatia had to offer was the reality of imperial servants, whom he saw as enslaved and humiliated individuals whose main function in the Austro-Hungary was to fill out Franz Josephs battalions of foot soldiers on their ways to different fronts. [His attitude toward World War I will be discussed at length in the following analysis of his novella Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne (The Battle of Bistrica Lesna)].7 After the First World War, Krleas political thought took a different turn. He became a Yugoslav patriot, again angry with the reactionary Greater Serbian regime which dominated the so-called First Yugoslavia, created in 1918 after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Disappointed with the idea of a Yugoslavia in which the former Austrian and Hungarian colonial dominance was replaced by a Serbian hegemony unwilling to recognize a Croatian national essence, Krlea soon enriched his modern Croatian patriotism by embracing the Marxist internationalism of interwar Europe. Always proud of his Croatian roots and his cultural Central European (or, as he liked to say, Danubian) koin on the eve of World War II, he recast himself as a supporter of Communist internationalism, especially of those movements that perished after the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union. The evidence of his admiration for revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht is found in his essays and poems, written after their death and dedicated to them.8 During World War II, Krlea refused to join Titos Partisans, although he was strongly opposed to the Nationalist Ustashi puppet regime of Ante Pavelis Nezavisna Drava Hrvatska (The Independent State of Croatia).9 As a member of the Anti-Fascist movement, he was captured by the Ustashi regime, but was not killed. After World War II, he became very close to Tito, who understood Krleas importance for the culturo-political stratum of post-war Yugoslavia. In spite of Titos eagerness to be close to such a monumetnal intellectual figure and thus further justify his
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vision of Socialims, Krlea always managed to keep a distance from Titoism and state-organized power centers, distance necessary for an intellectual to preserve an independent position. The geographical center of Krleas opus is Pannonia, the multi-cultural region and a hinter-national part of the Danubian basin, a region where individuals confront the uncertainty and complexity of their identity. The notion of Pannonian mud characterizes the destiny of Krleas characters in his multivolumed opus on the Glembays, his epic novel Zastave (Banners), his short stories, essays, diaries, as well as Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (The Return of Filip Latinovicz). That same mud that ridiculed the fictitious Croatian bourgeoisie depicted in The Glembays, the mud that destroyed the talented artist and intellectual Filip Latinovicz, was also the grave of the Croatian infantrymen whose destiny is described in Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne. As a novella that belongs to Krleas early phase (1914 to 1924)10 Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne offers a peripheral view of the general situation in the Dual Monarchy engaged in World War I. Krleas version of the Danubian basin complements the more dominant Central European perspective of Magris Danube.

The Croatian God Mars

Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne was first published in 1923 in Knjievna Republika11 (The Literary Republic) as a fragment of a larger collection entitled Hrvatski bog Mars (The Croatian God Mars). After the final version of the novella collection appeared in 1946, Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne was anthologized in Croatian and Yugoslavian literature. The atmosphere of the short story is grotesque, and its beginning is an inverted version of a classical invocation to the gods. The heroes are seven everymen drafted by the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army and sent to the battlefield of Bistrica Lesna, an unknown locality, somewhere in the Pannonia-like mud of the Russian front. Unlike the arms and the deeds of epic classical heroes, the protagonists of this short story are depicted as poor peas184

ants who are definitively unskilled in using the old and rusty rifles and knives assigned by the army. The subtitle suggests that it is a history of the battle, but, in fact, the battle itself is completely insignificant, and the narrator refers to a single detail only--the death of the six infantrymen and their commander, a collective death deprived of any of the glory or courage usually attached to the famous battlefields of world history. The tone Krlea uses is elevated and purposely pompous, producing a humorous effect based on the discrepancy between the official language employed in the description of the unfortunate events and the tragi-comic and grotesque reality of seven dying peasants dressed up as soldiers on the occasion of an imperial conflict. Such an elevated tone, ridiculed by Krlea in his invocation was used repeatedly by the Austro-Hungarian press during the World War I, in order to create an official ambiance of glorifying the Imperial soldiers deaths.12 In the novella, Krlea describes the last moments of the seven Croatian Domobrans (a term for a Croatian soldier which translates approximately to Croatian Home Guardsman and whose irony, given the Croatian sub-colonial position within the Dual Monarchy, is contained within the title itself) and their lieutenant, during the battle for hill #313 on the Russian Front. Krleas story is not a mere description of the collective destiny of the privates, as captured in the details of their senseless deaths, but also an account of the sub-colonial position of that Croatian peasantry under Austro-Hungarian rule. Each of his characters is an individual representative of the collective body of Croatian peasantry. Trdak Vid, for instance, is a soldier drafted from his village, where he had left two children behind without having any idea who would take care of them. Their mother had died, but still he had to go and fight for His Imperial Majesty. When he asked who would be in charge of his children while he was in the army, the administrative official in Zagreb answered in a disinterested and detached, Kafkaesque way. Each and every encounter between Trdak Vid and the Austro-Hungarian clerks was infused with a similar surreal feeling of delusion and betrayal. In spite of his illness, another soldier, Loborec tef, had to leave his new bride and go to the front line, because he threw
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a junior army officer, who had refused to assign him a new pair of boots, into a barrel full of hot coffee. Before he dies in a creek during the battle, he puts his hand on the humid soil, just to feel how fertile it is. This gesture uncovers the real potential of his scattered identity. It signals his unrealized peasant self, tormented as he remembers the natural conditions of his survival. The collective destiny of the others in this group is communicated through the gaze of a coroner who finds their documents and private letters in their uniforms and bags while their corpses were being stored in the military mortuary. The humiliation of these selfless beings did not end with their death. The cold and distant, often arrogant, behavior of the coroner prolongs their degradation and makes their shame survive them, reminding the readers how little they counted in the Austro-Hungarian war machine. Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne divides into four segments, according to the focus of narration and the thematic fragments which dominate within the entire narrative. A general voice, which informs readers of the broader social and geopolitical contexts of the battle dominates the first narrative segment of the story; this voice is externally focalized and omniscient as such. With a mixture of pathos and irony, it describes the general wartime conditions of Southern Central Europe in general, and of Croatia in particular. Its feigned documentary tone prepares the ground for the second part of the narrative, in which the seven dead domobrans are introduced. Between the second and third part, the difference in tone is much more pronounced than between the first two parts. The narrators focus shifts from the all-encompassing external focalization to a precise highlighting of the two masters of the upcoming military action, an Austrian and a Russian general. It ends with the description of the deaths of our heroes. The fourth and the last part is narrated through the coroners gaze: in distanced and cold retrospection, it relates the tragic destiny of the rest of the platoon. Continuing detailed analysis of the novella, several issues emerge which clearly indicate colonial elements within the narrative and shed new light on Krleas early opus, usually characterized as an aesthetic mixture of harmonic, disperse, and ecstatic nar186

rative structures, followed by the manner of simplification contained in the authors transparent discourse with a clear pragmatic function (Lasi, Mladi Krlea 18). All existing analyses of Krleas early opus emphasize his treatment of the underrepresented and humiliated characters as a part of his growing social awareness, related to his emotional and programmatic connections with socialism and with initial stages of Communism. These discussions have made no connection between his depiction of Croatian social and geopolitical strata and the discourse of colonialism. Not only Krleas novellas from Hrvatski bog Mars, but also his essays, poems, novels, and other narratives of the epoch, speak to his awareness of precisely such a colonial position for Croatia, linking this early twentieth-century Central European text to the global tradition of colonial narratives. The inverted classical invocation in the beginning of the novella undermines the official discourse of Austro-Hungarian press, whose pompous style was meant to glorify the heroic deeds of the imperial soldiers scattered all over the European front lines. The high tone employed by the state-sponsored journalists inappropriately describes the horrors of war, in the reality of which soldiers were falling dead, deprived of any glory and dignity, and very often completely unaware of why and where they were fighting. One of the best illustrations of such an individuals sense of loss in His Imperial Majestys army is found in another of Krleas novellas, a part of the same collection. The very beginning of Kraljevska Ugarska Domobranska novela (The Royal Hungarian Domobran Novella)13 describes two encounters of a cavalry officer with his subordinates: A domobran was so immersed in his weird thoughts that he could hardly hear the captain approach on his horse, Mica. When he saw him emerge from the mist, the domobran opened his eyes wide in horror. He started to stutter and mumble something. - To which company do you belong, you stupid ox? Thats what Im asking you!
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- Captain, Sir, I humbly report, I dont know! (Croatian God Mars 49)* After the captain finished raging and screaming at the soldier, he identified the domonbrans superior, and continued the aborted conversation with him: - I am the commander of the third platoon, sir, Corporal Bubnji... - Well, well! So, you are Bubnji! Of course, Bubnji. Somehow I am not surprised. Bubnji. Man! There is a troublemaker in your platoon who does not know to which company he belongs! Do you know what that means? This irresponsibility can cause very serious consequences. Such an indolence is unheard of! This is horrible! These people do not know their duties! - Where is the enemy? What are the coordinates of your attack? - The captain decided to ask another soldier, the one that carried his rifle upside down on his shoulder, like a hunter. The man just stood there stiff and stared. - Well? Why are you staring at me!? Havent you seen me before? Whom is your company attacking? Is this the way to carry a rifle in formation? Are you a forest ranger, you swine? Speak, for gods sake: what is the direction of your companys attack? - I do not know, I humbly beg your forgiveness! (49)**
* Domobran, koji gotovo nije ni uo kako je doao gospodin satnik, tako je bio zaokupljen svojim udnim mislima, da se sav lecnuo i zabezeknuo od uda, otkuda se najednom gospodin satnik na Mici iz magle stvorio ovdje, te je poeo neto da zbunjeno muca i blebee. - Vole! Koji si ti roj. To te pitam! - Gospodin satnik, pokorno javljam, ne znam! (Hrvatski bog Mars 49) ** - Ja sam zapovjednik treheg voda, gospodine satnie, pokorno javljam! Kadet-aspirant Bubnji... - Aha! To ste vi! Bubnji! No naravno! Nije ni udo! Bubnji! ovjee! U vaem vodu imade jedan arkar, koji ne zna, kojem rodu pripada! Znadete li vi to to

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These humble reports and pleas for forgiveness are deprived of the explicit irony so familiar to readers of The Good Soldier Svejk, whose adventures ridiculed this all-encompassing reality of the Monarchy. Unlike Svejk, Krleas unfortunate men were on the absolute outskirts of Austro-Hungary, and so their ignorance seems to be a logical consequence of the absurdity which followed the war. Their disorientation not only signals the sense of defeatism among those involuntarily drafted by the Imperial Army, but also describes the reality of the Croatian soldiers in a war into which they were pushed to fill out the mainly Hungarian-lead battalions. Krlea did not always chose such a documentary approach to the topic. In Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne, the narrators tone moves one step further than simply depicting the reality in its seemingly intact dimensions. Positioning his voice between the pompous tone of the Austro-Hungarian press and the grim reality of the platoon, Krlea begins this story: This history of a detail of the Battle of Bistrica Lesna is written in honor of the late gentleman and Commander Pesek Mato and of six dead Croatian Home Guardsmen (domobrans) of the second company, namely: Trdak Vid, Blaek Franjo, Loborec tef, Lovrek tef, Pecak Imbra i Kri Matija who fell during the heroic attack on the hill #313 thus spilling their royal Hungarian Croatian Home Guardsman blood for the glory of The Thousand-Year-Old Kingdom of Saint Stephen, according to the provisions of

znai ? To moe da povue za sobom najtee posljedice. To je neuvena indolencija! To je strano! Tu ljudi ne znaju svoju udjelbu! - Kamo navaljujete! - okrenuo se gospodin satnik spram nekog drugog ovjeka to je objesio puku preko ramena protupropisno kao lovac. - ovjek se ukoio i gleda. - No! to me gleda! Zar me jo nikada nisi vidio. Kamo navaljuje satnija. Pa zar se tako nosi puka u rojnoj pruzi. Zar si ti lugar, ti svinjo. Govori, sto ti bogova, kamo navaljuje satnija. - Ne znam, pokorno prosim! (49)

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the Austro-Hungarian 1868 Compromise. May they rest in peace! (9)* The language employed to celebrate the death of the Hungarian Croatian Home Guardsmen who spilled their royal blood for the glory of the Thousand-Year-Old Kingdom of Saint Isthvan, according to the Austro-Hungarian 1868 Compromise directly ironizes the sub-colonial position of the Croatian people. Except for this invocation, Krleas irony abstains from further humorous effects, because the situation in World War I Croatia for him was not a laughing matter. Like his critique of the Habsburgs which was, according to Magris and other prominent interpreters of his work, often exaggerated, one-sided and imbued with the tendency to ridicule the emperor and criticize his eagerness to control all the colonized lands, Krleas writing style also was determined by his marginal position within the Monarchy. Krlea does not exhaust himself simply in bitter expressionist criticism of everything existing; his language is more relaxed and sometimes even closer to Haseks in Good Soldier Svejk. As an modernist intellectual who understood himself as a voice of public dusturbance, and felt a duty to produce fictionalized social and political comentaries, young Krlea had to take a role of spokesperson for the underrepresented and utter some bitter truths from the Southern periphery of Central Europe. Haseks Svejk may be regarded as a comedy; yet Kundera, in spite of his humorous novels and short stories, sees Central Europe as a tragedy. For Krlea, at least in his earliest phase, Central Europe seems to be best represented in the epic genre. The first part of this epic episode describes a detail of a battle which was anything but heroic, characterizing the so-called subco* Ova historija jednoga detalja bitke kod Bistrice Lesne napisana je u poast pokojnoga gospodina i desetnika Peseka Mate i estorice mrtvih domobrana drugoga bataljona druge satnije, i to:Trdaka Vida, Blaeka Franje, Loborca tefa, Lovreka tefa, Pecaka Imbre i Kria Matije, koji su svi pali kod junake navale na kotu broj trista trinaest, prolivi tako svoju kraljevsku ugarsku domobransku krv u slavu hiljadugodinjeg kraljevstva Sent Itvana, u smislu Madarsko-hrvatske nagodbe od godine 1868. Poivali u miru! (9)

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lonial condition of Croatia, not only in World War I, but throughout its history. In his early phase, Krlea still believed in a mixture of Western cosmopolitanism and barbarogenius,14 and in some of his narratives (e.g. Hrvatska rapsodija; Croatian Rhapsody, 1921) he praised the Slavic element as a moment of salvation for the modern history of Croatia under Hungarian dominion.15 Following the romanticized idea that something good and progressive may come to Central Europe as a consequence of The Red October, a thought that he later abandoned, Krlea laments upon the poverty and enslavement of the Croatian people. Contextualizing the characters of the forthcoming battle in his novella, the author briefly recapitulates Croatian history: The gentleman and corporal Pesek Mato, along with the six heroes of our story, in their beginning, all lived the same quiet and bitter life, the life equal to the lives of millions of our people who century after century suffer in our mud, and every spring and every autumn they plough, hoping to get a fistful or two of grain so that they can have a piece of corn bread for Easter and Christmas -- the two bright days in the year, when peasants do not feel the weight of everyday life on their backs. Instead, they only feed livestock and smoke and drink in front of churches until noon. In a centuries-old-mist of slavery and hard labor, beatings, and peasantry, in this feudal fog which was still very thick in the year 1914 under the government of Franz Joseph I, and which was covering our village like a sad veil, all of our heroes felt their lives were like something created in the times of our Lord himself. Their grandfathers and great-grandfathers lived the same way, so what can one say or do about it? (9-10)*
* Gospodin priuvni desetnik Pesek Mato i est junaka ove nae pripovijesti, svi su oni ivjeli u poetku tihim i gorkim ivotom, kojim ive milijuni naih ljudi, to se ve stoljeima pate na naem blatu, te ga svakog proljea i jeseni preoravaju, da bi iz njega izvukli aku-dvije zrnja i pojeli reanj penine gibanice na Uskrs i na Boi, dva svijetla dana, kada se ne osjea teret svagdanji u kriama, ve

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In traditional colonial narratives, the relationship between the natives and earth, between the tribe members and soil, is usually ascribed to an idyllic pastoral period before the fall. Chinua Achebes postcolonial narrative Things Fall Apart (1958) is, for instance, divided into two main parts, before and after the arrival of the British missionaries in the village Umofia. The first two-thirds of the book speak of the old tribal ways. Even though the narrator neither praises nor romanticizes that uninterrupted time before the Colonization depicted in a violent arrival of Christianity, those times seem self-contained and self-explanatory. Within the tribe, strong bonds between the humans, their religion, tradition, symbolic order, and mother earth determine their identities. Ones personal identity was a mixture of his individual deeds and his family history, with a strong emphasis on ones own worth judged as a composite of all the skills involved in tribal survival and individual self-realization. Family history existed more as an active memory, a narrative whose purpose was to keep generations interconnected as well as connected with their gods. The personal story of Okonkwo, the main character of the novel, illustrates this order. He was a brave, traditional and trustworthy man and heroic warrior whose fame was well known throughout nine villages and beyond (Things Fall Apart 7) and was based on personal achievements in war and peace. His father Unoka was an artistic drunk, fond of long stories, music and winea man whose skills would better fit on streets of Paris than in the village of Umofia, were he was regarded as lazy, improvident and incapable of thinking. Although his fathers stigma may have affected Okonkwo on the level of tribal gossip, it did not overshadow his achievements and was not an obstacle in developing his own personality. Aware

se samo napaja blago po talama i pui i pijucka pred crkvom cijelo dopodne. U vjekovonoj magli tlake i rabote, dimnice i kmetstva i batina, u onoj feudalnoj magli, koja se jo godine devet stotina i etrnaeste pod vladom Franje Josipa Prvoga povijala nad naim selom kao alosno velo, svi nai junaci osjeali su taj svoj ivot kao neku stvar jo od Gospodina Boga stvorenu, i njihov djed i pradjed ivjeli su tako, pak to tu ima da se misli i to se tu moe ? (9-10)

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of his fathers hypothetically damaging legacy, the narrator explains Okonkwos position within the tribe: When Unoka died he had taken no title at all and he was heavily in debt. Any wonder then that his son Okonkwo was ashamed of him? Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father. Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things. He was still young but he had won fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages. (11) Time and history in Achebes novel, representative of classical postcolonial prose, has as its direction and contents the narratives which usually divide worlds; the idyllic and natural world of yesterday is seen apart from the aggressive and unnatural colonial intervention. Even after they were colonized by the British missionaries, the tribe members have managed to preserve their collective and individual memory. Although the colonization dismembered their present, their tribal original past has stayed remembered, and is rearticulated in the various postcolonial narratives in which those underrepresented and objectified struggle to regain their language and relate stories to the reader. Unfortunately, this option is not available to the domobrans in Croatia, who have no past pastoral narrative to which they can return. Thinking in Kafkas terms and recalling his belief that time in Central Europe has to be regained and that eminent Central European stories have to be narrated once againthis time not through the gaze of the oppressor but through the set of individual optics of the various oppressed peoples and groups, brings one closer to a comparison of the treatment of time in Achebes and Krleas prose. The nature of time, the vivid presence of before and after in Achebes novel, as well as Okonkwos position as an individual in possession of his identity, makes one wonder what happened to those same categories in Krleas novella? Instead of nostalgia, Krleas narrative is imbued with a strong sense of fatalism. In the minds of his characters, everything that exists, exists because God made it this way.
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All is eternal and resides outside historical circumstances. Men and women are poor because that is Gods will. And it is this way because the mighty say so, because it is written in all the public documents, in laws, and practiced in courthouses all over the country. Peasants are simply there to be exploited. Their God (or the Emperor) created a world in which strict rules and regulations stand for the natural order of things in this world. It is for that colonial appropriation of the ancient Great Chain of Beings that in his novella Krlea aludes to feudal fog. Unlike Achebes characters, then, Krleas heroes do not remember better days. There is no better past for them. They have lived for centuries in the same Pannonian mud, imitating the useless deeds of their ancestors. In contrast, in the initial phase of colonization that Achebe describes, after the British colonizers entered Umofia and built their church, the native people had a choice either to accept Jesus Christ, or to remain faithful to their tribal gods. Allegorically speaking, Krleas heroes had no such indigenous gods to turn to outside the control of the colonizers. Although the sun-god that Krlea invoked in his vision of innocence that he hoped to be reenacted as the fulfillment of yet another dream (the one of the Red Dawn coming from the young Soviet Union) was an old Slavic god, Pan,16 a cousin of the Greek Orpheus, that god was not represented as a nostalgic memory, but rather as a utopian symbol whose role was to connect the mythic tranquillity of a tribal creation with the final realization of the global dream of Social Revolution. Also, Pan is not available to the everymen of Croatia, because at the very end of Croatian Rhapsody he is mentioned only by a phantasmic and utopian character named the Croatian Genius and by the narrator himself in free indirect speech. In terms of Croatian history, the past has no significant period of freedom no time characterized by an indigenous symbolic order independent of the influence of the superpowers. Godless in this sense, Krleas characters have no dream of their past. On the eve of European decolonization, they are caught in a machine that prepares them for war. Their role in the global battle is not active; on the contrary, they are being collected to fill out the military
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statistics of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They sit in front of their cabins, dwell upon their lives, recapitulating individual pasts whose borders with the present cannot possibly be traced. Their present is eternal and its eternity replaces the historicity of the present available to the tribe members in Achebes Umofia. Although they feel a strong and long-suppressed vital energy, when they think about their lives, they think in the following way: Clerks and policemen, army barracks and townships, counties, paperwork, offices. To our heroes, it all seemed like a machine made up by doctors for one purpose only: to palpate an artery of poor peasants lives and to use its rhythm to count the peasants bags full of grain, pigs, and mares. All that high-class, doctoral, triple-imperial engine with all of its official decisions humiliated that powerful and invincible life within them. And whenever our heroes thought about themselves and their lives, it went approximately like this: here is my cabin whose roof is steep so that rain can pour off to the left and to the right, instead of on my head. This is a great invention. Prevents water from dripping on my head. That was passed on to me by my late grandfather. My warm, sooty roof. I will give it on to my son, because this is a good thing to have: a roof above your head. (A man would be an animal without a roof over his head.) Here I am, sitting beneath that mushroom of mine, watching smoke coming out of my chimney. The heavenly waters flow, soaking the fields, and this is good. My wife spins her skein like spiders do. There is a potato boiling in my pot, and there must be some greasy smoked ribs up in the attic. And that is all I really need. Life is good! (11-12)*
* I inovnici i andari, kasarne i oblasti, opine, spisi, uredi, sve je to naim junacima izgledalo kao stroj, koji je po gospodi doktorima samo zato izmiljen, da bi se bogekom ivotu napipala ila i da bi se prebrojale seljake vree i svinje i kobilad ali sav taj gospodski, doktorski, kraljevskotrojedni stroj i sve te kraljevske uredbe tog inovnikog stroja omalovaavale su onaj silni i nesavladljivi ivot u njima, i kad su ti nai junaci razmiljali o sebi i o svome ivotu, to

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Such a tone of complete resignation marks the atmosphere of Krleas peasantry. Their fatalistic relation to everyday life is timeless. Signs of absolute poverty and the humiliation imposed on the peasants by the agency of historical obligations that are embodied as various clerks, policemen, army officers, doctors and noblemen are passed from generation to generation, creating an atemporal abyss of the historical present. Such social stratification is a consequence of Croatias geopolitical situation on the outskirts of two dominant civilizations, Austrian and Russian, experiencing its reality in a centuries-old feudal dream. There is no sense of past nor future among these peasants. Although they respond to the numerous calls of history, they are its active ingredients. Although Krlea ascribes to them an invincible life and vital energy that is suppressed within their self-less beings, those peasants have been convinced throughout the history that living a life equals avoiding death. Deprived of an active position within the community, whenever they dream of better times, they see their dreams as ahistorical and timeless as their daily lives. Therefore, their utopias are also outside history. It is no surprise that the only projection that Krleas peasantry has is a naive utopian narrative which describes their preferred imagined communities and resembles early colonial narratives whose purpose was to arouse the European mind by depicting the earthly heavens of native tribes in far-away lands. On their way to the army barracks, our heroes walk the streets of the Croatian capital. This walk temporarily dislocates them and provokes their imagination. They feel completely alienated from their already non existent selves, and on their way to the Habsburgs war (12), which they see as a noblemens thing, their war
je onda otprilike izgledalo ovako: ovo je moja koliba, kojoj je krov strm, i kiica se slijeva lijjevo i desno i ne curi mi tako na glavu. To je dobar izum da mi voda ne curi na glavu, i to mi je dao djed moj pokojni u batinu, taj moj a avi topli krov, a ja u ga ostaviti sinu, jer je to mudra stvar: krov nad glavom. ( ovjek bi bio marvine da nema krova.) Sjedim ja pod tom svojom gljivom i gledam kako dim kulja, voda nebeska tee i natapa oranicu i to je dobro. ena mi lie povjesmo kao pauk, u loncu mi se kotrlja krompir, a nalo bi se i koje masno rebarce u dimu na tavanu. To je sve. Vie mi zapravo i ne treba. Dobro je ivjeti! (11-12)

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(13), the soldiers-to-be dream of a land they have heard about. Its name is Slarafija, and it is the land of leisure and wealth:17 They have heard stories about a wonderland called larafija. There, fried ducks and chickens fly straight into ones mouth. Fields are full of grazing pigs and sucklings on spits. Silver watches and chains hang from the trees. Their first days in the city seemed to be like those in larafija. They saw only the shops filled with dried meat. Thighs, smoked hams, legs and ribs, red bacon. The bacons deadly wounds have been previously burned by dark carbon. Long nails protrude from the holes. Blood sausages hang in the windows. In a bowl made of porcelain cracklings smell wonderfully. All that dry meat! A city full of dried meat! Hams hang like flags! (14)* The soldiers displacement had activated their imagination, and they compare Zagreb with a utopia. The imagery of dried meat and blood sausages in Krleas narrative in fact inverts utopia and represents the domobrans mythical imagination of the only optimal projection of their lives. The products of their farm labor, after they left the countryside and found their place in city shops where they are awaiting to be consumed by the rich, now laugh at their makers. These items that represent the peasants ultimate dream of luxury. All the utopias known to the Western reader, from Platos Atlantis, through the writings of Thomas More, Tomas Campanella, Franjo Petrich, Voltaire, and Swift, contain such elaborate descriptions of imagined perfect societies. Regardless of their purpose (Platos mo* uli su oni govoriti o jednoj udnoj zemlji larafiji, gdje peene race i pilii lete u usta ovjeku, po livadama pasu prasci i odojci na ranju, a srebrne ure i lanci vise po drveu i ta ivot u gradu priinio im se u prve gradske dane takvom larafijom. Sve sami zelheraji sa suhomesnatom robom! Sve same butine i rebra i crvena slanina debelih svinja, pak su smrtonosne rane zapeene lijepo masnom crnom a om, a kroz krvave rupe prodrli avli, te vise naduvena crijeva i cijede se trule kobasice i miriu varci po zdjelama porculanskim opletenim drotom, da se ne raspadnu. Samo suho meso! Pun grad suhog mesa! unke vise kao zastave! (14)

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del for exercising the ideal government, or Voltaires exaggerated critique of Europes bloodthirsty and arrogant colonial attitude, as depicted in Candide), each ou-topos exceeds basic human needs and offers a clear detailed description of the ideal government and the structure of a healthy society. Krleas heroes minds do not function on that level. Historically, they are so accustomed to belonging to foreign agencies that the idea of a just society does not exist in their colonized minds. Although the future heroes of the Battle of Bistrica Lesna may believe that a roof above their head distinguishes them from animals, their dreams and desires are still animalistic. Their imaginations are lead by hunger and despair, and the ultimate pleasure they can capture is food. For them, outside the Agency of history, there is no other description of larafija, except as a land where nobody is hungry. The reduced existence of the Croatian peasantry is thus epitomized in Krleas description of city stores, because in the same way that dried meat was hanging in front their eyes, their own flesh, wounded, dirty and dismembered, would soon cover the trenches and mud of His Imperial Majestys chessboard on the Russian front. The absence of a body politics for these Croatian foot soldiers, necessary in a community for its members to feel and perform as citizens, is correlated with hams and banners, not with human will. For our heroes, there is no difference between the public sphere of politics as symbolized in the form of flags and the bare survival symbolized in their own foodtaken away from them and hung publicly in the city shops, awaiting costumers from another, better world. In their universe, however, due to the historical circumstances, hams are the banners. In terms of a narrative structure, this fragment which ends the first part of the novella may be seen as a prologue in a Greek tragedy, in which our heroes, although unaware of it, foresee their own disaster. The difference between them and Greek epic heroes is that their personal tragedy is not a sudden fall from happiness into a disaster, but a narrative inscribed in their destiny a long time ago, in the timeless space of ancestors whose roofs for centuries covered their heads, convincing them that life was good. In a region outside of official history, the tragedy of our heroes began with their birth.
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Multiple voices I
Trdak Vids Long March through the Institutions The second segment of Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne begins with individual protagonists flashbacks which foreground their fictional existence. This timeless approach to Southern Central European history has its counterpart in Krleas narrative treatment of time as well. There is no future in this story. Everything is either narrated in the eternal present or represented through techniques of reminiscence. Like the timeless space of rural Croatia, the moment before the battle reflects the loss of time imposed on the characters by the seemingly timeless obligatory history (In a centuries-old-mist of slavery and hard labor, torture and peasantry, in this feudal fog which was still very thick in the year 1914 under the government of Franz Joseph I, and which covered our village like a sad curtain, all of our heroes felt their lives like something created in the times of our Lord himself10). Unaware that they have been betrayed by Our Lord, our heroes are sitting in trenches on the morning of the battle, and each of them revisits his home. The destiny of Trdak Vid is described in detail. Trdak Vid dreamed of his children, whom he had to leave behind. The day before he had to appear in Zagreb to report to military headquarters, he had buried his wife. Not knowing what to do with his two small children, he decided to ask the government to take care of them. In his simple sense of fairness, that was what the Monarchy was supposed to do--to return a favor and thus reciprocate for their demands. After a Kafkaesque tour through Austro Hungarian bureaucracy, Trdak Vid ended by talking to the same clerk who, earlier in the morning, had sent him around to others. This imperial notary refused to take responsibility for the children and suggested that Vid finds a solution on his own. Nonetheless, before he decided to dismiss him once and for all, the clerk had to document everything and write it down in a protocol. This sense of omnipresence of the emperors persona in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy is here incorporated in an official protocol, which gives the fake impression that Franz Joseph really cared
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for his people. A well-construed, identically designed and organized set of offices, police and train stations, theater buildings, and coffee houses made the Monarchy look uniform. In fact, that sameness was only a smoke screen for colonial exploitation. In its centripetal colonial dynamics, Franz Joseph constantly invited his peoples to look for help in the various administrative places carefully erected throughout the monarchy. Following the emperors advice, Trdak Vid in Zagreb experienced the same dismal journey that Josef K. did in Prague. After a long walk through the institution, he left its gates as empty as he was when he entered them. The total theater of the emperors administration is depicted in the following dialogue which took place in the government palace on Markos Square in Zagreb: - OK. Everything is fine old man! Ive heard it all, my dear! Yes! But, where do you expect me to put your child? We have no room for your children! We can write a protocol, my dear man! - Well, with all due respect, sir, doctor - or should we say - your honor! What do I do with a protocol? I dont know where to put my kids! - How much land do you have? - One acre! - How about a house? - A house too! - So, why couldnt the children stay at home? - But dear doctor, God help them! The oldest one is seven! How can they stay alone? - See here, my good man, you are currently receiving monthly financial support! Give it to someone in the village, and they can take care of your children. - What kind of piss-poor aid is that? Nobody wants to work for peanuts! - Then give your children to your relatives! You have relatives, dont you?
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- Yes I do. It would be better if I didnt have them. Damned relatives... they can all go to hell.... - Well, there is nothing we can do for you. We are not going to take your children and move them into the city. It is against our principles. Because, if we take them, they will become criminals, proletarians! They will become poor, understand? - Am I not poor, doctor, sir? We are all poor!... - Old timer, give them to some good people! - I beg you sir, where are those good people?... - Well find something my man! We shall write a nice memorandum to the district office! - The district notary is a thief and criminal! - Well write to the village priest! - Oh, please, our priest - Trdak Vid waved his hand in despair. - Well, well write to everybody! To everybody, my friend! To the district and to the county. We shall demand an increase in your financial support. Is that OK? And now we shall put together a nice protocol, sign it together, and everything will be just fine! (16-18)*
* - Da! Dobro je, kume! uo sam ja ve to sve, dragi moj! Da! Ali kamo da vam smjestim ja vae dijete? Mi nemamo tu mjesta za vau djecu! Mi moemo da uzmemo s vama zapisnik! I tako, dragi moj kume! - Je! Prosim ih, gospon doktor - bumo rekli-poglaviti! A kaj meni zapisnik bu? Ja ne znam kam bi z decom! - A koliko grunta imate? - Dva rala! - A kuu? - I kuu! - No! Pa zato ne bi deca ostala na kui? - Je, gospon doktor! Bog budi njimi! Ali sedem let je starei star! Kaj to more ostati sam? - Vidite kume, vi dobivate mjesenu potporu! Pa dajte kome u selu potporu! - A kaj je to, ta piliva potpora? Zato nigdo ni nee! - Pa dajte rodu! Imate valjda roda ? - Imam ga, imam al bi bole bilo da ga nemam! Kakni je to vraji rod? Da bog da, voda ga poplavila!...

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One of the main principles guideing the Austrians in their occupation of Central Europe was the old Roman practice of divide et impera. On a larger scale, the divide and rule practice created the Dual Monarchy when they adopted the potentially dangerous Hungarians within the framework of Austrian power. Hungary then further exercised their own national aggression to subordinate peoples of lesser gods, such as Croatians. That seemingly horizontal redistribution of power, reenacted in the Compromise which formally created the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, initiated a snowball effect of further colonization of the smaller peoples of Central Europe. Not only that those smaller peoples had to fight wars among each other, but that objects of their anger were implanted in their daily life in rather dislocated ways. Krleas proletarian cursing the Hungarian soldiers on their way to the Serbian front is a clear example of how such a dislocated target of hatred resulted from the Austrians divide et impera mechanism of conquest. Although, in the case of Krleas proletarian, his unreflected anger is directed at the wrong target, it is still easy to distinguish between him and his oppressors. In the case of Trdak Vid, the agencies and targets of his hatred are harder for him to recognize. On a subconscious level, the Croatian peasant feels that all those protocols are mere lies, and that the clerks who write them barely exist as real political entities. In spite of such real doubts, Trdak Vid and other peasants do not direct their anger toward the fictitious agencies of Austro-Hungarian power; in- Je! A ta vam mi moemo kume? Mi djecu principijelno u grad uzeti ne emo! Jer ako ih uzmemo, djeca e vam se protepsti. Proletarizirat e vam se djeca! Budu bokija postali, razmete? - Je. A kaj ja nis bogec, gospon doktor? Em smo si mi bokija!... - Kume! Dajte ih nekud dobrim ljudima! - Ah, prosim ih, a gdje jesu ti dobri ljudi?... - Ve e se neto nai, kume! Mi emo lijepo pisati dopis na opinu! - Biljenik je tat i lopov! - Mi emo pisati upniku! - Ah, prosim ih! Na veleasni - mahnuo je Trdak Vid rukom. - Pa pisat emo mi ve svima! Svima, kume! I na kotar i na upaniju! Urgirat emo, da vam se povisi potpora! Sada e i onako biti poviene potpore. Eto! Sada emo lijepo zapisnik sastaviti s vama, kume, pak e sve biti dobro! (16-18)

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stead, they vent their hate against their closest relatives, neighbors, local notaries and priests. With individual interests partitioned as consequences of the imperial presence in Croatia, these alien powers have succeeded in colonizing the minds of the native population to the extent that they could not distinguish a serious enemy from a made-up one. Moreover, they could not even single out a real reason for their fear, poverty and tragedy. Trdak Vid is aware that his real problem is going into a battle which is a part of their war, but he still imagines that, by resolving the status of his children, he can achieve his civil rights as an equal. His colonized mind cannot see even the first step of the colonial hierarchy. In his public performance, in front of the clerk, he is oblivious to the fact that solving the problem of the draft as his possible point of departure may actually solve the problem of his childrens custody. Although in the course of the conversation in the government building, he thinks to himself how crazy it is that the doctor cannot see that he is going to war (Ta za boga miloga! On putuje sutra na frontu! Kako to ovomu doktoru tu nije jasno, da on sutra putuje na frontu?(18) For Gods sake! He is going to go to the front tomorrow! Is it possible that this doctor here cannot understand that he is on his way to the front-lines?) (18) he cannot utter this statement alloud. Instead, it remains the exclusive property of his humiliated self, a self which, due to the feudal circumstances, cannot be defined in positive terms. Privately, Trdak Vid sees the government clerk as a near-sighted fool who smokes a cheap tobacco, but, in his public performance, he treats him as an omnipotent agency of timeless oppression. Since Trdaks private sphere exists only in the depths of his wounded consciousness and does not know how to communicate with the external world, it is practically nonexistent. The only thing that counts and that ultimately defines Trdak Vid as a reified subject, is his public impersonation of a soldier, a particle in the large machinery of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Such a partitioning of reality is a captivating and manipulative gesture employed in Krleas narrative technique. The consequences of that colonial dynamics of atomizing reality in Trdaks case
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manifest themselves in a kind of helpless siding with the oppressor, criticizing priests, neighbors, and relatives, implicitly blaming them for his tragedy. Such a moment in the history of a people in which everybody is perceived as a victim and a villain at the same time is usually regarded as a totalitarianism. For little people like Trdak, the specificities of Austrian totalitarianism were contained within the liminal space of the prescribed and the proscribed. This sophisticated game based on polarized categories was coordinated by imperial headquarters, where all the rigid rules were authorized. This double syndrome of limitations left deep scars in lives of Croatian peasantry, and Trdak Vids useless trip to the capital speaks to the absolute control imposed by the imperial law and order. To negotiate the proscribed (his right to life, happiness and personal future), he had to go through the channels of the prescribed. After the aforementioned agency of law and order accomplished the proper treatment of the prescribed (after a clerk composed a protocol), the proscribed has been codified, officially partitioned (Trdaks right to life has been atomized and the problem of his childrens custody singled out), named, described, and written down. Through an act of administrative fiction, Trdaks potential anger is pacified. After his departure from the government building, Trdak Vid has the same sense of hopelessness he had upon his entrance, despite the fact that his despair now acquired an official name nailed down in a protocol signed by a notary and stamped with the Imperial-Royal seal. That protocol was meant to calm Trdak Vid, but after he walked out of the building, his sense of despair grew even larger. It became so because, after he received official proof that there was nothing that could be done to right the wrongs of this world, he felt absolutely insignificant. How could he, a poor peasant, expect to solve a problem that even His Imperial Majesty cannot? Trapped in such an existential enigma, Trdak Vid loses all hope that his individual life had a meaning. That centuries-old feudal mist about which Krlea speaks reemerged once again convincing our hero that all the nonexistent good and omnipresent evil comes straight from God. And since there was nobody to blame (in spite of his bitter inner feeling that he is being betrayed by the system as embodied in that near-sight204

ed clerk), everyone, himself included, has to be either forgiven or punished. In such a totalitarian context where choice is nonexistent, there is no difference between clemency and punishment, and so going to war seems a natural thing to do. The dislocated agencies of oppression controlled and exercised by the Austrian Court, in its vertical distribution of colonial rule, have deprived people of their elementary feelings about belonging to a certain group, demanding their rights, and even recognizing the sources of their tragedy.

Multiple voices II
A Supply Sergeant in the Barrel: The Displaced Anger of Loborec tef The consequences of colonization for an individual are seen also in the tragicomic destiny of Trdak Vids companion, the Croatian Home Guardsman Loborec tef, a newly-wed when called up to join the army as a part of his regular military service. Like Trdak, he felt deep inside that the system was taking a sacred right away from him. A newly-married man, according to that mythic, sacred law, has a right to enjoy his wife and start their life together. Ironically, Loborecs sacred right was given back to him by Habsburg officialdom in the form of a sick leave, after he spent several weeks in the military hospital, suffering from typhus. Unfortunately, while he was still in the hospital preparing to return home, another set of army doctors arrived and redirected him, together with thirty-eight others, to the front. Twice deprived of his sacred right to rejoin his wife, Loborec fell into apathy. After his arrival at the barracks, he was absent when other soldiers were assigned a new kit and equipment, and he was not given a needed pair of boots. A psychological transference similar to Trdaks took place, and Loborec directed all of his anger toward a supply sergeant, another draftee who was just in charge of footwear. Aware that he would have to go to the Galician mud wearing his torn shoes, domobran Loborec decided to pay a visit to the commissariat-officer, mit:
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He was standing right in front of mit and clicked his heels according to the rules to leave a good impression. mit screamed at him: - Go to hell! Leave me alone! - Sergeant, sir, I humbly beg you, but... my shoes... They were sucking the sergeants blood all day at headquarters because of some missing 27 crowns and 16 philirs, and now he was counting goods and making a new inventory, hoping to find a mistake. He was searching for forgotten or misplaced expenses when Loborec came and messed up all of the sergeants calculations. So he exploded: - Get the hell out of here, you thief from Zagorje! You are all thieves! - I am not a thief, but its you who has stolen my rights! In fact, mit did not hear what Loborec said, nor did he have any idea what the soldier wanted. He was infuriated by the unbelievable arrogance of an ordinary domobran scum who interrupted him, insisting that he, mit, stole something. Like he didnt have enough of his superiors this morning, enough of those Hungarian swindlers, playing that same tune and calling him a thief. And he slapped Loborec tef hard and loud across his face, just to rid himself of all that nuisance. Right at that moment, the cooks were crossing the yard carrying a barrel full of hot coffee. Possessed by madness and with his warriors pride wounded, Loborec grabbed the sergeant and threw him into the barrel of coffee. Loborec could not grasp how an ordinary warehouse-man, a flea-market thief, could slap him, slap a soldier who is going into the battle for the third time in his military career. Soaked through by the boiling coffee, mit drew his sword and hit Loborec in his left shoulder, cutting deep into his flesh. In the shadows, among the plucked chestnut trees, next to the empty barrel of black coffee, disarmed by the guards,
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soldiers, and cooks, the domobran Loborec tef sensed that everything that just happened was not good for him. (22)* The domobrans predictions were right, because the same night, frightened by some army laws alien to him, and afraid that he might end up being executed for his horrible crime, Loborec agreed to a compromise: he went to the front lines in spite of his serious wound. Caught in the military machine, our hero suffered the same consequences as his colleague in Zagreb. His search for identity in a colonized context went wrong. In this dialogue there are both similarities with and differences from the encounter between Trdak Vid and a government clerk. Like Trdak Vid, Loborec tef had been deprived of his sense of self and thus became unable to find a firm standpoint in the confrontation with his superior. Unlike the near-sighted clerk from Kaptol, however, Loborecs superior was also uncertain of his identity. The entire situation between a domobran and a sup* Stajao je pred mitom i jo lijepo tram kvrcnuo petama, da stvar to bolje ispadne, ali se mit uzrujano iskesio. - Idi k vragu! Daj mi mira! - Gospodin narednik pokorno molim, ali moje cipele... Gospodin narednik, kome su itav dan na diviziji pili krv radi nekih dvadeset i sedam kruna i esnaest filira u jednoj protunamiri, sraunavao je partije robe i problematine svote i traio zaboravljene izdatke, pak mu je Loborec izmijeao sve kombinacije, i tako je planuo. - Mar, ti tat zagorski! Svi ste vi tati! - Nisam ja tat, nego ste vi meni moje pravo ukrali! mit zapravo nije ni uo to ovaj tu eli i to on tu govori, nego je mita razbjesnila ta neuvena drskost, da ga jedan prosti domobran zaustavlja i da mu jedan prosti domobran veli da je krao, kada su mu cijelo prijepodne na diviziji svirali to isto madarski vindleri. I tako je uio Loborca tefa, glasno, iz sve snage, da se rijei ve svega toga do vraga. Ba u taj tren prolazili su preko dvorita kuhari s velikim kotlom vrue crne kave, I Loborec, u bunilu bjesomunom, u povrije enoj frontakoj asti, da njega, koji sutra putuje trei put na frontu, tu na rajonu uka jedan magaziner jedan tat kramarski, skoio je na narednika, pograbio ga i bacio u kotao crne kave. Okupan u kipuoj kavi, mit je povukao sablju, zahvatio Loborca u lijevo rame, zasjekao ga duboko u meso i tamo u polutmini, me ju oupanim kestenovima, kraj prolivenoga kotla crne kave, razoruan od strae, priprave i kuhara, osjetio je domobran Loborec tef, da sve to to se dogodilo nije bilo dobro. (22)

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ply sergeant thus resembles a comedy of errors. Both the attacker and the attacked are unable to define themselves in the hierarchical situation of their encounter. The sergeant jumps on Loborec, not even knowing who the man is or why he has approached him. He has been infuriated by the Hungarian superiors who accused him of stealing goods from the army warehouse. Unable to direct his anger toward the real agency of his oppression, the sergeant attacks an available and weaker party, an ordinary piece of domobran scum, Loborec tef. Throughout the story, a reader can follow many such displacements of anger as a consequence of depriving potentially fulfilled selves of their real nature. Such confused dialogues, in which two Croatians fight for trivial reasons, are clear examples of the divide et impera principle in action. In this case, not only are two members of the same group successfully divided and their interests brought to the point of a physical showdown, but their selves are also partitioned off from their consciences to the extent that neither can single out the causes for frustration. Loborec tef senses that his sacred rights have been taken away from him, and he expresses his despair. Although he can feel the aggression, the sergeant cannot connect the soldiers scattered utterances and accusations in a coherent narrative; therefore, the only way he can defend himself is to transfer his damaged sense of self (a self attacked by his superiors) onto his public military function. Unable to recognize his immediate reality, the sergeant has to make one up and then pretend to be in control of it. Such a made-up reality is a substitute for a nonexistent one, the one that had vanished as a consequence of physical and mental colonization whose victims were captured in a vicious circle of mutual languishing and elimination. Each moment of their interaction as objects of colonialism produced a confused and confusing mosaic of experiences of reality whose particles, instead of defining the two people, further deprived them of their real selves. In such a set of transferences, Loborec tef is not seen as a person, but rather as a thief from Zagorje, scum, or a nobody who performed the utterly inappropriate gesture of intimidating a superior. The sergeant, on the other hand, is accused of stealing a sacred right from Loborec and
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of being a flea-market thief-- again a nobody with no right to interfere with a brave warrior. None of these characterizations actually correspond with the reality of the people to whom they are attached, but are convenient labels superimposed by their imperial owners a logical product of the feudal mist that has covered Croatia for at least four hundred years. For men caught in this kind of a bureaucratic machine, the made-up reality of the sergeant and the domobran seemed more real than the one they lost in the centuries-old colonial pattern of foreign presence within the country. They simply do not remember what it ever meant to be Croatian by means of freely inhabiting their own land. The triumph of such a reified and objectified reality over human lives is evident in further development of Loborecs selfless self. Forced to chose between execution and being sent to the front, Loborec tried to motivate himself for the forthcoming action in battle, imposed on him as part of his historical obligations. In the train that transported soldiers closer to Bistrica Lesna, our hero managed to find a reason to die. In a train station on the way to the front, he witnessed a fight among the soldiers and saw an army officer killing a private. That moment was crucial for tef to recognize that, in another senseless homicide, in the death of an innocent soldier, another man had been deprived of his sacred rights, his right to live. At that moment, Loborec tef decided to go to the battle, to tease out that hidden layer of his sacred rights that had been taken away once and for all from him and his peers. His identity search, however, is never accomplished. It remaines unfulfilled because it istrapped between the poles of the proscribed and the prescribed of the bureaucratic empire, out of his control. He is shot in the battle and dies before any ghost of his sacred rights had a chance to appear before his eyes. He finds the emptiness of his tomb as he throws his own body into it. The death of Loborec tef is described in detail in the third narrative segment of the novella. The symbolism of his death parallels the set of unanswered questions that made up his life without a sense of self. At the moment of his death, the domobran feels the same anger and helpless rage already familiar to him. Although he grasped the fact that he would not be able to single out those who
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had deprived him of his rights in his hopeless struggle against the phantoms, Loborec died confused and unable even to direct his anger toward his killers: - Somebody is shooting at me, the bloody bastard, thought Loborec reaching for his rifle. His rifle was nowhere to be found. It was left behind in a trench, and he was here, lying covered by someones corpse, without his gun... Up to this moment, he had still been a man who intuitively felt that an injustice has been done to him. He felt that it would be fair if he were to attack those hooligans and thieves, smugglers and swindlers; to grab a rifle and start shooting at those criminals back in the rear-- at everybody, from the general to the battalion shoemaker. Like a tamed animal, he feared the cannon-balls and bullets coming in his direction. With his face thrust under an unknown Hungarians overcoat, bloody and angry, convinced that somebody is tying to shoot him, he grabbed the rifle he found and started to shoot into the mist, into the mud, into raspberry bushes, into nothing! What harm had he done to anyone? They took away his six-week leave and pushed his own wife away from him with a rifle-butt, next to an army-barrack fence! They almost mutilated him, dragging his body from hospital to hospital; they stole his shoes, and now, on top of everything, they are still shooting at him? Let us see what tef Loborec is capable of. Is he going to put up with this any more? Is he going to permit everybody to do whatever they please to hurt him? He traveled full speed in a stream engine of the battle. (38-39)*
* - To netko ba po meni strelja, mater mu krvavu, - domislio se Loborec i posegnuo za svojom pukom. Njegove puke nije bilo nigdje, ona je ostala u jarku, i on je tu, zaklonjen neijom leinom, leao bez puke... Do onog asa on je jo uvijek bio ovjek, koji je mutno osjeao da mu je uinjeno krivo i da bi bilo potenije, da se obori na one fakine i peke, liferante i kadrae

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The objectified reality and imposed obligations that circumscribe the space of our heros existence are summarized by an impersonal pronoun IT, a performative important in understanding Krleas treatment of the specifics of the Habsburg colonial paradigm. In the excerpt quoted, Loborec senses that he is being shoot at, and that there is something out there, an impersonal entity, ready to get him and punish him for some nonexistent crime. Confused and infuriated, in the midst of yet another transfer ([he] started to shoot into the mist, into the mud, into raspberry bushes, into nothing!), Loborec keeps cursing at an unknown but omnipresent IT, an entity that speaks from the beyond, from the space outside of his worldgoverning his destiny. In the novella, Krlea mentions that mysterious IT which always appears to be crucial in shaping the heroes lives. During his stay in the military hospital, Loborec reflects upon the inhumane conditions invoking IT. In order to single out the agency which manipulated his life and his daily routine, he addressed it in an impersonal form: ([on] se razbolio od tifusa, dugo umirao i nije umro, nego ga bacilo u oporavni odio... (19) /[he] got typhus, was dying for a long time, but he did not die; instead it threw him into the recovery ward (19). Also, before he realized that somebody was shooting, aiming at him, a bullet or a piece of shrapnel hit the shovel he held in his hands and threw into the air. Looking at the shovel ejected from his hands and flying away from him, Loborec commented: it took it away (odnijelo je, 38). That impersonal IT was

vindlere, da uzme puku i da pome streljati sve one lopove u pozadini od generala do bataljonskog ustera. Kao pitomo blae on se bojao te vatre, ali zarivi sada njuku pod zelenu kabanicu nepoznatog madarskog mrtvaca, raskrvavljen i razdraen u dubokom osvjedoenju, da to netko upravo po njemu puca, on je pograbio puku i stao da strelja u maglu, u blato, u kupine, u nita! Komu je on to skrivio? Njemu su oteli njegov estonedjeljni dopust, i enu su mu ro enu odbili od njega kundakom kod plota kasarnskoga! Razmrcvarili su ga, po pitalima su ga povlaili, ukrali su mu cipele, i sada jo po njemu strijelja? Da vidimo tefa Loborca, hoe li on dugo da trpi, da ba svi po njemu lupaju?... On je putovao na parostroju bitke punim tempom. (38-39)

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the Croatian god Mars, the irresistible power of the distant empire that made war and turned all the domobrans into non-beings.

It a world seen from beyond and above

The usage of an impersonal IT is constant throughout Krleas writing. IT, representing a category of alienation and of an omnipotent and omnipresent entity. It directly shapes Croatian reality for individuals removed into that irresistible space of history. Perhaps the best examples of IT are to be found in Krleas early poetry. The author was an admirer of Karl Liebknecht. Four days after Liebknechts assassination, on January 9, 1919, Krlea wrote one of his best-known and most frequently interpreted poems, entitled: Good Friday 1919. Aside from addressing the impersonal IT, the poem also speaks of Croatias subcolonial historical condition uncovering the transcendent nature of the centuries-old oppression of the region. Good Friday 1919.
In Memory of Karl Liebknecht

O, Big Headless Something, cursed be your name, forever and ever! Bloody nails again fester on a human hand, and the ill-fated bird of darkness sings a deadly song. The ill-fated bird of darkness, the blind owl-bird. O, Big Headless Something, cursed be your name, forever and ever! ... In the bloody slavish light of a red police lamp, what is there left for a Croat to do? He swallows Croatian tears,
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salty and bitter salt. White and hated, naked and humiliated the Ideal, will it stay crucified forever? In the bloody slavish light of a red police lamp, what can a Croat do on a European Good Friday? ( Poetry 106-107)* The central motifs of the poem speak of the marginal position of Croatia in the European constellation and illuminate Krleas concept of its sub-colonial structure. It is quoted here to parallel the novella Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne, and in part because of the ispronounced presence of IT, that entity whose importance Krlea underscores by naming it Veliko Bezglavo Neto (The Big Headless Something). This mysterious entity familiar to his protagonists appears in Krleas opus in two basic forms -- either as the unknown something, an IT, or as an unknown someone. Such a someone also appears in another Krleas poem Jesenja pjesma (The Autumn Poem).18 Written in blank verse, the poem belongs
* Veliki Petak 1919 Karlu Liebknechtu u spomen O,Veliko Bezglavo Neto, prokleto ime tvoje, u sve vijeke vjekova! Krvavi avli opet ovjeju ruku gnoje, a zloguka ptica tmine mrtvaku pjesan poje. Zloguka ptica tmine, slijepa ptica sova. O, veliko Bezglavo Neto, prokleto ime tvoje u sve vijeke vjekova! ... U krvavom uznikom svijetlu crvene pandurske lampe, to moe hrvatski ovjek? On hrvatske guta suze, slanu i gorku sol. Ideal hoe li bijeli prezren i popljuvan, gol, razapet biti dovijek? U krvavom uznikom svijetlu crvene pandurske lampe, to moe hrvatski ovjek, na Evropski Veliki Petak... (Poezija 106-107)

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to Krleas war poems and describes a subjects personal visions of the fall. Using personification as his main strategy, Krlea introduces the feeling of uncertainty and indeterminacy involved in his own understanding of the world. The motif of an unknown someone, employed as the constitutive lyric element of the poem, highlights the secretive atmosphere of uncertainty underlying his sense of self and of the world (Nepoznat Netko donio je Jesen u Sjevernu Sobu... An Unknown Someone brought the Autumn into the Northern Room [31]). The distribution of these two mysterious categories of unknown agency in The Battle of Bistrica Lesna gives the narrative that final touch of totalitarianism, like the foreign presence within Croatia. The IT that Loborec tef constantly in pursues finally appeares in the shape of a someone similar to the someone who brought the autumn in the northern room in Krleas poem. Witnessing the death of another Croatian Home Guardsman -- his platoon leader, Pesek Mato, Loborec experiences a sensation that he compares to experiencing snow. Under a heavy artillery attack, Loborec is covered with soil and sand: Zemlja se sipa kao da je netko lopatom baca, i sav taj dim i to blato, sve je to tako gluhonijemo i tiho. The soil flies around and seeps as if someone were throwing it around with a shovel, and all that smoke and that mud, it is all so deaf-mute and quiet (Hrvatski bog Mars, 35). Such extreme situations narrate the existential, hierarchical and strategic edge of characters life, and they are usually characterized as motivated by that unknown but natural force of IT. The distribution of Krleas IT as an alien agency merges the last two parts of the novella into a single semantic unit whose discursive space is delimited by these three parallel manifestations of IT. More precisely, the loci of IT on the broader narrative map of the battle inform the readers about the colonial mechanisms of Habsburg history depicted by the author. IT, in the last two sections of the story, speaks from three different perspectives: from beneath, from above, and from the beyond. The first perspective, from below, belongs to the voices of the domobrans already familiar to us. The second one, from above, belongs to those in charge of the foot soldiers destinies. The person
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who decided the destiny of our heroes in the novella was Rikard Weisersheimb, Ritter von Reichlin-Meldegg und Hochenthurm, a colonel in the headquarters of His Imperial Majesty, Franz Joseph. He was the officer in charge of an army formation of Croatians who, having been reduced to a cartographic representation, exist only as a faint red line drawn in pencil. His double, Baron von Frederiks, the commander-in-chief of the Russians, had equal interests in another pencil line running across hill # 313, a desolate peak with a small chapel on its top. Their argument seemed to be of a personal nature, because the IT that concerned them and guiding their pencils was not the same IT that oppressed our heroes. The reason these superiors gave for their argument and battle was their mutual disrespect. Weisersheimb deeply believes that Baron von Frederiks is an idiot, an absolute beginner, and ignorant (30). Von Frederiks thinks of Weisersheimb in equivalent terms, and were it not for the lives of our heroes involved, as well as for the lives of millions of others, the conflict between these two military men could easily have resembled a game of chess. The entire conflict, from Krleas perspective, was a synecdoche for World War I, an episode in which these masters of ceremony, detached from the real protagonists of the slaughter, make their moves oblivious to the destinies of individual pawns who had been drawn into the global conflict. Such a superimposed IT that speaks from above is not immediately available to the perspective of our soldiers. Even the ability to look above themselves is outside of their symbolic order. All the aggression released on behalf of the humiliated, injured and destroyed infantrymen finds its false targets on the horizontal hierarchical plane of their immediate environment. The Battle of Bistrica Lesna ended badly for Rikard Weisersheimb because he loses. Baron von Frederiks was not such an idiot after all, but they both knew that there would be another opportunity for them to play a new round in this war game. For our heroes, in contrast, IT materialized itself in its final form as death. Killed on the battlefield, they rejoined the soil and once again became one with nature, closer than ever to their Pannonian mud, the timeless mud of which their lives were made. These soldiers were perceived as pas215

sive colonized objects by the superimposed IT incorporated in Rikard Weisersheimb, Franz Josephs missionary in charge of the military situation in the southern provinces of the empire. They were unified with their natural environment, with the earth, and unable to define their own realm of culture which would enable them as subjects to postulate their own identity. The collective death of the seven domobrans in Krleas novella thus stands for the ultimate defeat of Croatia, a country strangled by the feudal mist of centuries, still very alive and real in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The third and final impersonal IT of the last two sections of the story is personified once more as the coroner Pali, whose protocols are written in the military mortuary, telling the post-mortem histories of the domobrans. This particular IT seems to speak literally from the beyond, from another separated reality from where the deeds of all the dead can finally be codified, and their memories canonized. The death of a third soldier, Kri Matija, is described in following terms: Born, vaccinated, killed, his belongings available in the supplement: two letters, twenty four crowns, a pocket-knife, a mirror. (39)* The end of the collective journey of those seven domobrans is a logical consequence of their lives, in the liminal space between the proscribed and the prescribed. Governed and approved by endless protocols composed by numerous clerks (the emperors missionaries) their deaths and lives find record in a box on yet another form attached to still another official protocol. This time, the statistics and the administrative language of the Empires prescribed literally have the final word. Men, or their remains, are treated as specimens, as tidy elements of the paper-work that needs to be done to confirm and to document the continuity of the foreign hegemony whose impact defines the reality of one of the South Central European colonies.
* Ro en, cijepljen, pao, ostalo iza njega u prilogu: dva pisma, dvadeset i etiri krune, depni no, ogledalo. (39)

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The letters sent by Kri Matijas two lovers from his village illustrate the level of illiteracy among the commoners and reaffirm the poor state of Croatian reality at the beginning of the twentieth century. In contrast, the coroners narrative once and for all places Kri Matija and his dead comrades into the formulaic taxonomy of his books of the dead. The reader is thus brought to see that the official reports on the deceased are no different from their daily struggles. Their quotidian selves remained covered with numerous layers of fulfilled and unfulfilled expectations, summarized in the totalitarian syndrome of the prescribed. The seemingly calm and precise Austro-Hungarian administration had finally managed to produce a set of formulaic testimonies about reasonable expectations imposed on their soldiers that might convince contemporary observers that all its affairs are handled in a proper and dignified way. In spite of the existence of such a theater in which the actors may claim their sacred rights to earned sick leave or a decent pair of military boots, seven domobrans, deprived of their own language and voices, entered yet another reality, a post-mortem space in which all the particles of their scattered selves were named and codified. Finally, at the cost of the silence that followed their lives, they are granted the eternal peace. The last IT in the novella thus speaks from the beyond, but not from a beyond that could allow for oppressed groups to transcend their immediate conditions and step out of the boundaries of their underrepresentation within the empire. The category of the beyond is very important for any individual who seeks to transcend the limitations of the self under the conditions in which this same self is circumscribed by authorities who impose their language on that individual. For Homi Bhabha, beyond signifies spatial distance, marks progress, promises the future; but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary--the very act of going beyond --are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the present which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced (The Location of Culture 4). Although individuals belong to the present, the we in Bhabhas narrative behaves the same way Krleas domobrans do. Even though they are nominally in a better position be217

cause they have the present to count on, to perform in, and to define themselves against its qualities, the step toward the realm of the beyond, toward a utopia, a new version of life, does not seem to be easy. And this step is a necessary move, one which would enable an equal discussion between the colonial other and its oppressors. Although Bhabha may have thought of a different geopolitical scheme in addressing the necessity of speaking from beyond empirical reality, the imperial presence within Croatian borders in the times of our dead heroes calls for such a move directed toward a beyond, toward a reality that could transcend the situation and liberate the discursive and performative space that would facilitate a process of self-recognition for the people trapped in the Pannonian mud. Unfortunately, that beyond for Krleas heroes was available only as a definite retrospective, narrated post-mortem, from a different ontic space. Those silent and silenced die without even having a chance to feel that crucial realm of the beyond, a space which would have allowed them to transcend their immediate reality. Such a transcendent step may be possible in the Post-Communist conditionin the post-colonial situation, in todays Central Europe and its possibilities will be outlined in the concluding chapter. However, in Krleas times, the recognition of its necessity was the exclusive property of a few Croatian intellectuals, whose horizons, like Krleas, were broad enough to encompass many facets of the long-lasting oppression. Aware of the gravity of the sub-colonial reality of his people, Krlea ends his novella on a very pessimistic note: The obituaries are falling onto the division coroners desk like rain, followed by letters and pleas written by the late domobrans. And all of that the pupil Pali is reading and registering, everything is already over, and there is no medical or legal way to remedy that. Nothing can be changed or revoked any more. Not only did Trdak Vid end up here with his unfinished protocol, on which he forgot to write URGENT MATTER, but also his six friends from the Second Division of the Second Company. Brigades and divisions of
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the dead walked through these crossword puzzles written by the coroner. And they are still marching toward infinity, mute, bowed down, miserable and, although innocent, sentenced to death. They are walking in quadruple military formations in a deaf stampede of endless nocturnal convoys, their equipment, their guns, shovels and knives, all banging. One can hear how they pull their shoes from the mud. The division coroner stopped adding and subtracting for a moment, pricked up his ears like a dog, and caught his breath when some horrifying clarity appeared before his eyes. There, outside, the miners from Zagorje are marching. The miners who have been swallowing charcoal and disgusting smells, poisonous gases, all having climbed out of their collective grave, lit their oil lamps, and now they are silently walking lined up in a double file, going into another cave, this time without a way back. The wine-growers from Podravina, and peasants from Stubica, the grandchildren of Matija Gubec,19 they are all marching outside in the darkness, and they will all return back here to his coroners desk. And he will read their love letters and petitions, he will look at those horrible barbarous snapshots, search through the documents, and there will never be an end to it. (43-44)*
* Padaju smrtovnice na stol divizijskog mrtvozornika kao kia, a sa smrtovnicama pisma i molbenice pokojnih domobrana, i sve to ak Pali ita, registrira, i sve je to svreno i svemu tome nema vie ni medicinskog ni pravnog lijeka, ni utoka ni priziva. Nije samo tu ostao Trdak Vid sa est svojih pajdaa iz drugoga voda druge satnije, sa svojom molbenicom, na koju je zaboravio napisati da moli brzo uredovanje, brigade i divizije mrtvaca proetale su se kroz ove skrialjke i stupaju dalje u beskonanost, nijeme, pognute, jadne, nevino osu ene na smrt. Idu u etvororedovima, u gluhom topotu beskrajnih nonih kolona, tucka im oprema, manliherice, lopate, noevi, uje se kako izvlae bakande iz blata, pak je divizijski mrtvozornik zastao na as u zbrajanju, naulio ui kao pas i zaustavio dah od stravine neke jasnoe. Eto, vani stupaju zagorski rudari, to su itav svoj ivot gutali a u i smrad i otrovne plinove, ustali su iz jednoga groba, zapalili svoje uljenice i idu tiho u

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The battle that our heroes had to fight was lost in advance. As pawns in the chess-game between the two imperial missionaries, the Austrian Weisersheimb and the Russian von Fredericks, 20 invisible from their heights, our domobrans ended their tragi-comic lives defeated by the paper phantoms of the construed reality imposed on them by the global geo-political mechanics of kingdoms whose paths crossed on the intersection between the East and the West. Since they never had a chance to become individuals, their lack of individuation as personae (as well as literary characters) is described at the very end of the novella, when a collective hero, built up of a plenitude of layers of centuries-old oppression, marches toward infinity. The collective entity that epitomizes the entirety of Croatia is affected by the same historical destiny whose paths inevitably lead toward a tragic outcome, toward a collective death. The final march of the dead, as described in the novella, has a clear pragmatic function. It signals Krleas own vision of Croatias future, a temporal category otherwise absent from the narrative. Depicting Croatia and its colonial history as a waste land, Krlea laments its subhuman and subcolonial conditions in the early twentieth century as an unfortunate historical strata in disagreement with the global geopolitical strategies whose dynamics after 1918 were otherwise marked by a new era of decolonization. Instead of finding the Danube, an artery that could lead out of their timeless circle, many a marginal Central European group will remain in the Pannonian mud long after the death of Krleas domobrans took place.

dvoredu u drugu jamu i u nepovrat. I vinogradari podravski i teaci stubiki, unuci Matije Gubca, svi oni stupaju vani u tmini i svi e se oni vratiti natrag ovamo na njegov mrtvozorniki stol. I on e itati njihova ljubavna pisma, molbenice, gledati one strane barbarske fotografije, listati dokumentima, i nikada tome nee biti kraja. (Hrvatski bog Mars 44)

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A colonial perspective from below

Krlea as Central European Other Aside from its role in the corpus of modern Croatian literature, Hrvatski bog Mars also has its distinctive position within the broader space of Central European literature. To this point the focus has been on Krleas narrative and its importance in revealing the colonial situation of Croatia within the Dual Monarchy as a historical and psychological phenomenon. There are, however, two specific additional problems that arise from Krleas own understanding of Central Europe, as well as from his practical treatment of the colonial metaphor, largely exploited in his description of the Croatian sub-colonial agony. Despite his all-encompassing role in twentieth-century Croatian literature, Miroslav Krlea demonstrates some curious limitations in understanding his place on the European as well as the global literary map. His first problem was determining his own identity as an author and articulating a free system of signs for establishing a bilateral communication with the world. To a great extent, his difficulty was due to the marginal position of his native culture. Even writers from comparatively richer cultural and literary traditions, such as the Czech Milan Kundera, struggled to define their Central Europeanness against the double colonial dynamics imposed by the West and the East. Unlike Krlea, Kundera has at least been admitted to Central Europe as a cosmopolitan citizen. In spite of his exclusion from the mainstream corpus of Central European literary scene, however, Central Europe remained the dominant part of Krleas intellectual engagement and, as such, one of the most frequently discussed issues in his opus. Although he himself is an organic part of the Central European cultural strata, regardless of his lack of wider recognition by the mainstream European and World audience, Krleas outlook on the region contains specific characteristics of a writer whose homeland is marginalized and whose cultural and literary horizons can be defined as those of a minor literature.
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Meditating upon Central European culture, Krlea prefers to define it with reference to himself as a writer, and usually refers to it as a Central European Literary Complex. In general terms, he considers this complex of literatures in various languages as an aggregate of a philosophy of life, or more precisely, Weltanschauung, a set of aesthetic ideas and lifestyles typical for the region. Adding his voice from the 1970s to the cacophony of intellectual wanderers who a decade later strove to define Central Europe, Krlea considers as Central European all the countries where German is spoken (Germany and Austria), as well as those populated by non-German peoples of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Sometimes he also includes the Poles and the people from the Baltic states as members of the Central European ethno-cultural community, and he is not opposed to viewing some Northern Italian regions as Central European entities (Trieste, Furlania, Veneto). The latter brings him very close to Magris map of the region. Krleas Central Europe can be divided into three partially separated aspects. First, in his work, Central Europe exists as a geographic reality and culturo-historical region. Its geography as well as the contents of its rich past and tradition, still present in the social reality of the region, retain privileged places in Krleas narratives. Moreover, they form almost the exclusive frame of his prose, from his earliest novellas to his last five-volume novel of epic dimensions, Zastave (The Banners, 1967-77). Second, Central Europe appears as a culturo-geographical term repeatedly present in Krleas essays, which are usually written with a pronounced awareness of Karl Krauss style. Krlea viewed Kraus as a unique figure in early 20th century European cultural life and respected his brave style and sharp humor. Very often, Krlea saw Kraus as an embodiment of the term literature of engagement.21 Third, every analysis of Krleas complete opus (an ambitious project that could only be accomplished by a team of competent writers, critics, historians, journalists, linguists, literary theoreticians, philosophers, biographers, bibliographers, and lexicographers) could not escape noticing the profound interconnections between the cultural, aesthetic and geopolitical codes of Central Europe and Krleas own aestheticized
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symbolic order, incorporated in his variety of narrative strategies which attempt to undercut the narratives imposed upon his region. At the time of Krleas birth as well as throughout his early adolescence, Croatia, culturally and geopolitically, belonged to Central Europe. As an integral part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Croatias overall orientation was aimed toward Vienna. Its educational system was based on use of the German language, and the architecture of Zagreb, Osijek, Rijeka, and other larger Croatian cities followed the urban and architectural styles of Vienna from the epoch of so-called Ringstrassenra, creating the illusion of a continuity of imperial cultural and geopolitical space. Even at the Empires peripheries, lifestyle, vogue and aesthetic outlooks in those peripheral urban centers were strongly shaped according to the mainstream code dictated in Vienna and Budapest. The illusion of Central European cultural and political unity was further reinforced by World War I and its aftermath, in which Germany and Austro-Hungaryafter being united in the common front of Axis Powersalso shared the consequences of the defeat of their ideology. The collapse of the Monarchy and its military debacle, followed by unsuccessful social revolutions and fallen fascist regimes, have driven those countries further away from Western Europe into a liminal space of the Occident. Krleas formative years passed in such a social and cultural environment. In spite of loud and aggressive disagreements with the political ideas and aesthetic standards so typical of cultural life in Zagreb, Croatia, and the Monarchy alike (disagreements which he never hesitated to express in his public activities), Krleas spontaneously embraced the image of Central Europe as the focus of his professional and personal interests. His essays speak to his high level of familiarity with the social, cultural and political life in Vienna and Budapest. Furthermore, unless the fictional reality of his narratives is absolutely fictitious and located in a utopia,22 the textual map of his books is situated in Central European cities and landscapes.23 Still, it is interesting to stress that this Central European environment feels natural to Krleas characters, while their every trip further to the West ends in a disillusion, disappointment and failure.24
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After World War II and the victory of Titos partisans who introduced into the region the values of yet another (this time state-capitalist) dictatorship, benevolently called Socialism, Krlea decided to distance himself from his earlier take on Central Europe. His decision was to a large extent governed by the official Yugo-Communist rejection of Central Europe. According to the new rulers, there was no difference between Mitteleuropa and Central Europe, and every sign of appreciation for the now-proscribed region was considered a sign of decadent imperial nostalgia rather than a look toward a new political future. Krleas reevaluation of Central Europe took place mainly in his essays and political writings, while its earlier position in his fiction remained intact. As the director of the Yugoslav Institute for Lexicography and the founding father of Encyclopedia Yugoslavica, for example, Krlea publicly dismissed the importance of Central Europe and tried to introduce and affirm the specific values of a new multiethnic and cross-cultural geopolitical entity, Yugoslavia. Since to speak of Central Europe in postwar times was considered anti-Yugoslavian propaganda, a celebration of the world of yesterday and evidence of nostalgia for a time in which the newly-emerging nation of the Yugoslavs was brutally exploited by an earlier imperial hegemony, Krleas move can also be seen as an expression of his opportunism. In spite of his powerful stature and charisma, Krlea did not want to take the chance of opposing Titos official politics regarding the cultural status of the young nation in statu nascendi. Instead of pursuing his earlier fascination with Central Europe, Krlea employed several new markers whose role was to promote the new nations multicultural identity based on a legacy of socialist revolution: so, he began to advocate the idea of a Yugoslavian cultural autonomy. The tokens symbolizing these newly-emerging values were material: gold treasures from the old Croatian town of Zadar, Serbo-Macedonian frescos found in the numerous monasteries in South Serbia and Macedonia, and the standing tomb-stones of the Bogumilsan original Bosnian religious sect whose doctrine was unique and did not correspond with the traditional dogmas of Roman Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy or Islam. In Krleas symbolic order, these items occupied the vacant places pre224

viously reserved for Central Europe; on his new (or alternative) cultural map, they became the spiritual as well as cultural foundation for Krleas own justification of his place in new Yugoslavia. In his late phase, Krlea repeats his negative feelings toward Central Europe. In the conversations with Predrag Matvejevi, 25 Krlea goes so far as to equate Central Europe with the war aspirations of the Axis Powers in World War I. He calls Mitteleuropa the pan-Germanic political or, better imperialistic/czarist/slogan from 1915, when both the empires, in spite of their battles, were in inevitable agony (Stari i novi razgovori s Krleom, [Old and New Conversations with Krlea] (117)). Further, he negates his earlier idea about the aesthetic and morphological specificities of Central European literature and insists that a line needs to be drawn between him and his personal aesthetics and the dominant artistic codes of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Herman Broch. The difference between Krlea and his Central European colleagues is, according to the Croatian author, in his pronounced engagementin a distinct quality to which he claims the exclusive property in relation to these other authors. He even goes that far to claim that engagement cannot be found in Kafkas, Musils, and Brochs writings. Krleas post-World-War-II denial of Central Europe, is thus most probably a composite of several factors among which the most pronounced are three: (1) his fairly opportunistic but not defeatist public performance in Titos Yugoslavia, which was partially due to his suppressed belief in the World Revolution and partially a sliver of a collective feeling of Titos totalitarian presence within the country whose official values were not to be disputed; (2) his anger toward the centuries-old colonization of Croatia described in the analysis of Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne; and, (3) finally, his personal sense of exclusion from mainstream Central European literature, reserved for the bigger names such as Kraus, Kafka, Musil, and Broch. His post-World-War II verbatim negation of a Central European cultural complex and its autonomy should not, however, discourage Krleas interpreters and critics from taking the cultural logic of Central Europe as the point of departure for their analysis of his opus. Not only is his work analogous to the mainstream dynamics of Central Euro225

pean literature of the twentieth century (for example, the similarities between his anti-utopian Blitva and Musils Kakania; his poetic visions of World War I corresponding with Georg Trakls; his everymen in Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne resembling an existentially reduced epic modification of Haseks good soldier Svejk, and his theater plays heavily influenced by works of Henrik Ibsen and August StrindbergScandinavians whose aesthetics shaped the artistic taste and literary atmosphere of Central Europe up to date). His treatment of World War I, as seen in Bitka kod Bistrice Lesne, too parallels the apocalyptic visions so familiar from other Central European narratives, especially Karl Kraus Last Days of Mankind. From the perspective of Russian and Western European writers, World War I lost its status as a constituent literary material much faster than in Central Europe. Regardless of these mainstream European literary dynamics, in Krleas opus, World War I remained a central topic long after it was considered exhausted by Western writers. Even his latest novels, Banket u Blitvi (1938-64), and Zastave (1967-77), contain a variety of scenes which take place between 1914 and 1918. Aside from these thematic similarities, Krlea also shares with his Central European colleagues the same rich philosophical background, a pronounced tendency toward intellectualizing, and the frequent employment of relevant and trendy philosophical insights in his essays, poems, prose, and theater plays. He also shows a strong longing for an absolute and a search for firm categories to define the turbulent reality of the region. Krleas future attains almost the dimensions of a later socialist utopia, a well-known structure among the Central European writers, regardless of their political orientationfrom Zionism through Radical Constructivism. The discrepancy between his desire to define and explain Central Europe driven by his thirst for canonizing the permanently escaping nature of this protean landscape, and his obvious willingness to resign his analytic aspirations followed by his adoration of Central European geopolitical indeterminacy, as well as readiness to successfully replace it by a cultural strata characterize not only Krlea, but all the writers mentioned in this study, including Magris, who turned the geographical Danube into a multiple text of history.
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Despite his uncertainties regarding Central Europe, Krlea is a central marginal figure from the regions southern borders, a gigantic intellectual whose position as a hegemon in a small but rich culture with an impressive literacy enabled him to define Croatian culture. Unfortunatelly, due to the centuries-old colonial treatment of his country by the superpowers, his position also limited his perspective on his frequent use of colonial metaphor. Deeply concerned by the collective tragedy of his people, Krlea recognized the importance of employing colonial terminology in order to communicate the subhuman conditions experienced in Croatia, a country in the heart of Europe whose destiny in many ways paralleled that of the more remote lands colonized by the British, French and Dutch. His recognition of Croatias subcolonial conditions, a state of affairs that Krlea associates with the turbulent regional past, seems only to have contextual meaning for his work. Although the author demonstrates great precision in criticizing the Habsburgs as well as their predecessors (The Ottoman Empire, Napoleons army, even the Romans) for their long-standing colonization of South Central Europe, he is oblivious to the danger of perpetuating the same colonial metaphors used to depict Croatian reality. Such obliviousness caused him to produce and reproduce stereotypes in comparing his country with other, non-European loci, and limited his possible exploration of other modes of introducing authentic historical narratives of Croatia. What is outrageous for Croatia as part of Europe (its sub-colonial reality) seems to be normal for some African and Asian localities. Several examples, in which the author uses colonial language to describe the situation in his country while actually reenacting it, illustrate Krleas limitations in understanding the consequences of global scale colonization. His perspectives regarding colonial metaphors can be divided in two. Both are paternalistic and uttered from above. His first perspective sounds benevolent and somewhat romantic, representing the imagined reality of the Orient in order to escape the European frame. Yet the employment of these metaphors is just another way for the author to escape the essentially utopian cultural strata of Central Europe by creating different, more exotic
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utopias, detached from the realities of their worlds on the fantastic principles of leisure similar to Magris utopias of travel and hotels. The second perspective is more explicitly subversive for Krlea. It actually undermines his credibility in writing about Croatia as an Austro-Hungarian colony. Random and arbitrary statements about the so-called Third world are used to illustrate the backwardness and historical displacement of Croatia on the global geopolitical map, thus detaching it from Europe. The first, more benevolent symptoms of Krleas Occidentalism are found in his widely-read and highly-acclaimed novella Cvrak pod vodopadom26 (The Cricket Beneath the Waterfall). Thematically and structurally different from his early war prose, the motif of a cricket and a closing scene which takes place in a toilet are new naturalist moments in the authors narrative evolution.27 The story itself is a high- modernist introspective narrative in which the main character, a disillusioned intellectual, hospitalized in a mental institution, recapitulates his life in an inner monologue. In this monologue, recorded by his doctor, he hallucinates communicating with the dead. Trying to escape from his deceased friends who, he is convinced, follow him, he suffers the horrifying visions of the mutilated war victims. He dreams of an escapes: Why in the world should I care whether there is such a thing as literature without political commitment? The travel agencies on the other hand, with their colorful brochures, are addressing themselves to me, inviting me most hospitably to spend Easter in Florence or Christmas in Egypt. Here, however, in this stuffy waiting room, where one can hear from behind the wall a broken water tank of an adjoining toilet, like some distant waterfall, here there is nothing but the stench of wet rubbers and melted snow... To spend Christmas in Aswan does not seem so bad. And the twenty thousand drugs, wrapped in their silvery foil and cellophane, as tempting as the most expensive candies, the Egyptian moonlights...cruise ships, women, halcyon skies, holy wafers, pills-they all prefigure a relief
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from insomnia, from bad digestion, headaches, and depression. (The Cricket Beneath the Waterfall 36) Since he could not travel geographically while retaining nominal possession of an identity as a Croatian intellectual, Krleas character decided to browse through his own private mental travel agency. Exiled mentally29 from the environment usually called by Krlea the Pannonian mud,this fictional traveler represents a marginalized Croatian intelligentsia. According to Krlea,30 their escapism individually transcends the colonial political reality of the country and negates its true dimensions as they refuse to face its facticity. A negator of such a reality, our hero is experienced enough to recognize familiar totalitarian mechanisms within the newly-emerging Yugoslav nationalistic context, already at issue in the 1930s Serbian- dominated Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In his personal survival-game, surrounded by this new totalitarianism, the mind traveler is, in fact, interested in aesthetics, privileging art over daily politics, and is deeply marked by the World War I wounds that decimated his generation. In consequence, this intellectual decides to take a mental trip in order to fence himself off within the borders of his temporarily lunatic creativity -- to possess himself in a negative way, rather than to be possessed by an emerging Yugoslav national and political construct. Once again, in this history of a South Central Europe on its way to democracy, an individual is removed from the new scene of the nation-state to the ou-topos of a madhouse. Still, the usual pattern of developing cultural identitiesin a context where a nation is superimposed over a culture and in which the necessary strategic space of the beyond is still non-existent depends on individuals like Krleas character to provide their essential images and to connect the inhabitants of the region by defining themselves against other, different nations. Such faked individuation is, however, too transparent and pedestrian for Krlea: he sees that, in order to become an individual, every I has to place himself/herself against others -- either as allies (if they belong to the same group) or as enemies (if they are on the opposite sides of the
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fence). He is aware that such an essentialist process is innapropriate for a real individuation to take place. It is so, because this process is a product of a particular environment in which, for an individual to have an identity, s/he has to perform the same kind of act as the nation does, either as an ethnic or political entity. Being trapped within such a false hinter - nationalist game of individuation in post- World-War-I Yugoslavia, Krleas character decided to look for another, better place to activate his new and (he hoped) contextually-inappropriate self. In his immediate empirical reality, unable to give up essentialist concepts, he chose to define himself through otherness. In his case this process seems comparatively harmless. Unlike his immediate environment, he (like Krlea at the time of writing the novella) does not want to appropriate the country for his own, new purposes. He simply dreams of going to Aswan. Still, the voice in his hallucination uses a distinctly colonial model of mental excavation to define his desired geography, and relies on a frantic search for better (that is, more exotic) spaces. From the repertoire of his exotic dream (the Egyptian moonlights... cruise ships, women, whose images are mixed with the halucinatory ones of halcyon skies, holy wafers), it is clear that the same colonial model -- a model which obviously worked (and still works) for the imaginative mapping of Central Europe on the national and cultural level -- worked for Central Europeans (in this case, the Croatian elite) on the individual level, as well. His journey to the Orient is as determining of his Occidental identity as any of the colonial fantasies of Western Europe, except that he becomes temporarily insane when he goes there. Politically and mentally excommunicated from an environment which never belonged to itself, but only to alien agencies from the Roman to the Soviet Empire (Central Europe), Krleas character believes that, unless he exiles himself voluntarily, his imagination may be re-colonized by the new owners of his immediate empirical reality. Yet on his way to his own peace, this Central European still uses a colonial metaphor in order to write about his own displacement out of the geopolitical order. This vicious circle of colonial metaphor does not allow him to see any further; he is defining him230

self in terms of the essentialist concepts of identity still alive within his empirical reality. In this sense, Krleas 1930 narrative surpasses its immediate time-frame and offers a diagnosis relevant for the contemporary and ongoing identity crisis in Central Europe. Because of Central Europeans intrinsic inability to overcome that negative search for identity, manifested through defining people not in terms of who they are, but rather through comparing themselves with their cultural and ethnic neighbors, detailing via negationis, what did their neighbors fail to accomplish and, consequentially, who did they fail to become (each of them individually and all as a group), these essentialist concepts of a true Central Europe cannot solve the problem of colonial subordination in the times of the foreign presence, nor can they properly address the resurgence of nationalism in post-communist condition marked by the (re)emergence of seemingly new nations. They can follow the paradigm shift (the end of the Cold War for instance) only by renaming the already existing models. In such a process, reborn nationalisms take the empty space of communism while perpetuating the same model of oppression. Everything forbidden under communism is allowed in neo-nationalism and vice versa. In communism the sacred entity, that ifviolated becomes the blueprint for repression and physical elimination, was the class. In nationalism, it is the nation. Such a simple substitution and renaming of the values allows the continuity of terror, generated and conducted by a powerful minority in control of the state(s). On the theoretical level, that renaming remains static, abstract, trapped in the realm of language. When language renames such models instead of transcending them, it merely perpetuates the limits of their concepts, regardless how poetic the intended meanings may seem. As an application of such a circular strategy, then, Krleas characters purportedly liberating colonial dream merely perpetuates the cycle. A colonialist (or Occidentalist) reference to Aswan allows Krleas character to create a fictitious self, but, since it is trapped in a solipsistic viewpoint, it does not provide either him or others with a reality or historical reference that they can either consume or share.
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Other examples, in which Krleas treatment of colonial vocabulary serves the purpose of depicting poor Croatian reality, again underline the danger of using a language not to communicate and create a new discursive reality qualitatively different and more progressive that the present onebut to rename already existing models and thus perpetuate their conceptual limitations. When in his book Deset krvavih godina (Ten Years Soaked in Blood), Krlea describes Zagreb as a Central European city, he writes: In the center of the city, streets are asphalted: here city lights, electromobiles wash the roads, and there: the worst imaginable misery. People cry in open wagons, live in disgusting cabins made of raw lumber and cardboard, in shacks much closer to those found in the Congo than to a house, even in the lowest civilized sense possible. In the center of the city, the Botanical Garden with Alpine flora, greenhouses with tropical flowers, Chinese temples reflected in the quiet mirror of the pond. Here a library dressed in bronze and marble with several hundreds of thousand volumes, incunabula, and maps. But only a hundred meters away, pond-scum, Asia and typhus, the most banal, provincial and backward peasant land lying in a swamp, just like it used to be several hundred years ago, when our Capital, together with all the other towns, was a pitiful country town, forgotten somewhere far away on the Turkish border, in some God-forsaken place. (Ten Years Soaked in Blood 125-26)*
* U centru ulice asfaltirane, tu velegradska rasvjeta, tu polijevanje plonika elektromobilima, a tamo: stambena bijeda najgore vrste; ljudi jadikuju u otvorenim vagonima, u ga enja dostojnim straarama od dasaka i nakatranjene hartije, u barakama koje su mnogo blie Kongu, nego kui u bilo kakvom, pak i najskromnijem civiliziranom smislu. U centru Botaniki vrt s alpinskom florom, tu staklenici sa tropskim biljem, kineske glorijete nad tihim ogledalom jezerca, tu biblioteka sva u bronci i u mramoru sa nekoliko stotina hiljada svezaka, inkunabula i folijanata, a sto metara od te biblioteke abokreina, Azija i tifus: najbanalnija provincija zaostale, movarne seljake zemlje, kao prije nekoliko stotina godina, kada je na

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Due to the state of his colonized mind, the Congo and Asia became Krleas examples of uncivilized countries in which such conditions are normal. For Croatia, a Central European country, however, they are not acceptable. The belief that Asia is not us, and that what Asia has, we should reject -- is a typical colonial strategy for self-definition. Unfortunately, in spite of his own central position as an intellectual on the margins of Central Europe, Krleas sensitivity falls victim to familiar dynamics of cultural colonization, a colonization which he is otherwise capable of recognizing only in Croatias colonial history. Although his outlook on the recognizable colonial directions (the East and South of the imagined center) does not diminish his unique observations regarding Southern Central Europe in general and Croatia in particular, historically and aesthetically immersed in his own colonial reality, he cannot find the needed beyond to transcend the boundaries of his own, more universal distribution of the colonial metaphor. Krleas clumsiness in dealing with colonial iconography is also due to his Eurocentric position, to his desired Central Europeanness, and to life on the margins of dominant cultures where an individuals destiny, to a great extent, parallels the paths of his fictional heroes. His own imperial attitude toward colonies has no significant resonance in his ethnic or racial politics, becauseas a life-long sympathizer of the Communist movement in its theoretically better versions as represented in the words of the defeated cosmopolitans such as Liebknecht, Luxemburg, and Antonio Gramsci Krlea was also a cosmopolitan, and as such had no a priori hierarchy against which to evaluate the variety of races and ethnicities. In his own words, used to describe the slavish feeling of passive resistance of the proletarian who directed his helpless anger toward Hungarian soldiers on their way to the front, Krleas dislocated use of colonial metaphors has little to do with the political reality of his ecumenical ideology. In his essay Andre Gide o Kongu31 (Andre Gide Speaks About the Congo), Krlea, who was in serious
Glavni Grad sa svim ostalim gradovima bio saaljenja dostojna palanka, zaboravljena daleko negdje na turskoj granici, za bojim leima. (Deset krvavih godina 125-26)

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aesthetic disagreement with Gides categories of Order, Harmony, Culture of Spiritual Values, embraces the style of the essay, in which Gide managed to escape the expected reproduction of the colonial metaphor. Krlea was very pleased to see that Gide, rather than praising the glittering equatorial dream in the moonlight (Andre Gide o Kongu 4), actually recognizes a racist hell and reports about it in very realistic terms, infused with strong feelings of sympathy for the oppressed. He sees Gides shift from his aestheticism to almost a journalist abruptness as a valid and human testimony of the contemporary political, moral, colonial, and imperial chaos (8). He does not, however, see that empathy only inverts the dialectic between us and them without transcending the circle and suggesting a new point of view. Such a general awareness of global politics, compared to Krleas own use of the colonial metaphor may confuse his readers. This improvised and partial global awareness is just another unfortunate consequence of the imagined cosmopolitanism of intellectuals in insular geopolitical regions where the dynamics of regional politics, in spite of dictating world history on many occasions (the Assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, Titos break with Stalin in 1948, the creation of the Union of the Non-Aligned countries in the early 1960s as Titos, Nehrus and Nassers response to the global division into the NATO and Warsaw pact, the Yugoslav war in 1991), frequently overshadow the broader, global picture. It seems that, because of this obscure geopolitical gaze, real colonies were geographically, as well as intellectually, far away from Krlea. The suggested historical and strategic constellation still does not excuse him for his use of stereotypes. In spite of his awareness regarding Croatia as a colony, Krleas language has never de-colonized itself when speaking of different continents. This, too, can be seen as a consequence of a captive Croatian and Yugoslavian reality in which intellectuals have always been obsessed with clarifying their confused immediate environment in order to regain their national as well as individual past. This attempt to claim their regional identities before entering more global views may be inevitable for subjects who attempt to de-colonize their en234

vironment by writing testimonial personal narratives, meant to replace the already existing colonial textual testimonies, which were for centuries their only sources for documenting South Central European reality. Claudio Magris had managed to suspend the validity of historical narratives that described Central Europe from the external, colonial perspective by offering a travelogue in which a set of individual testimonies relocated the Danubian basin. The rivers banks are appropriated according to the requirements of individual narratives of a literature to which Kafka refers when he meditates upon the time that needs to be regained and the Central European history that needs to be re-written. Krlea sees the same problems for the region, but he addresses them as an intellectual who never has spoken one of the dominant languages of the West. His ways of belonging to a minor literature are not the same as Kafkas. Unlike Kafkas variety of German, Krleas language of underrepresentation, regardless of how artificial, had no linguistic superstructure. It was never measured against the language of a larger, dominant culture against which it could base its otherness. Furthermore, he cannot divide himself into the three competing master discourses of the West, as Magris did, and achieve a solid critique of its narrative techniques. At best, Krlea can multiply himself into seven Croatian foot soldiers, a supply sergeant, and a coroner, to document the limits of his narrative representation rather than to co-opt scattered voices in order to transcend their and his reality. Krleas attempts to reach the beyond end in an act of mental self-colonization. Even Kafkas Josef K. and Haseks Svejk had better chances to escape their reality, for they had a clearer European image of who is us and who arethem. Regardless of the unique conditions of their own enslavement and marginalization, their narratives illustrate that they had more than Pannonian mud as their source of frustartion, with their own, more visible, gods and their own, less interrupted, past.

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1 2

Unless otherwise is indicated, all translations from Croatian are my own. This was not the first time that Croatia was under a Hungarian rule. At the beginning of the twelfth century (1102), the Hungarian king Koloman and Croatian nobles signed the Pacta Conventa, and Croatia became subordinated to the Hungarian Crown. Although in 1242, the Hungarian king Bela IV. proclaimed Zagreb a free royal town, a region where tax-free trade was meant to allow multinational business to take place, Hungarian dominance never withdrew so that Croatia could freely develop. The multinational corporations, around which trade and hegemony were organized functioned according to languages in use: Slavic (lingua sclavenica), Latin (lingua latina), Hungarian (lingua hungarica), and German (lingua theutonica). However the public use of languages was hierachized, with Slavic on the bottom. This evaluative distribution of languages is yet another proof of colonization, even in the early twelfth century. As Louis-Jean Calvet, in his book Linguistique et colonialisme: petit trait de glottophagie, (Paris: Petite bibliotheque payot, 1974) writes, the right to name is a linguistic counterpart of the right to possess (for more, see especially the paragraph: Le droit de nommer, 56-60). In the reality constructed by the Pacta Conventa, the speakers of so-called Slavic had significantly lesser chance to assert their rights using their indigenous communicative system. This Hungarian dominance remained official until 1521, when the Croatian noblemen for the first time chose a Habsburg monarch for their ruler. Croatia remained under the Austrian dominance until the 1867 Ausgleich, whose direct impact for the Croatians was baptized in the Nagodba, signed just one year later. Miroslav Krlea, Teze za jednu diskusiju iz 1935, Nova Misao 7 (1953) 3-17. Hrvatski bog Mars (Croatian God Mars), a collection of short stories about the Croatian Home Guardsmen and their misfortunes during the World War I, whose different versions have been published from 1922 until its final edition, which appeared as a volume of Krleas Collected Works, (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1976). Miroslav Krlea, Eppur si muove, Plamen 15 (1919) 15-28. For a thorough discussion of Miroslav Krlea and his relation to the Monarchy, as well as of his role as a Central European intellectual figure, see Ralph Bogert, The Writer As Naysayer: Miroslav Krlea and the Aesthetics of Interwar Central Europe (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers Inc., 1990). This novella is a part of Krleas collection: Hrvatski bog Mars (Croatian God Mars), which was first published in 1922. After Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were killed in 1918, Krlea reacted in his diaries entitled Davni Dani (The Old Days), calling the murder of the revolutionaries: the act of criminals. He also wrote a poem entitled Veliki Petak 1919, (Good Friday 1919), dedicated to Karl Liebknecht. It was published in a periodical, Plamen (The Flame) Vol. I, 1919.

3 4

5 6

7 8

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For a complete and detailed account on Krleas attitude toward the Independent State of Croatia see, Stanko Lasich, Miroslav Krlea i Nezavisna Drava Hrvatska 10.4.1941-8.5. 1945 (Zagreb: Globus, 1989).

10 Its best analysis can be found in Stanko Lasi, Mladi Krlea i njegovi kritiari 1914-1924 (Zagreb: Globus, 1987), and in Stanko Lasi, Kritika literatura o Miroslavu Kreli od 1914. do 1941. (Zagreb: Globus, 1989). 11 Knjievna Republika, I. 2-3 (1923) : 3-47. 12 Krleas language in this novella follows the pattern used by Karl Kraus in his Last Days of Mankind where he satanizes the tone of the official press. Kraus influence on Krleas writing is especially strong in his essays, polemics and satiric commentaries. 13 The implicit irony is in the title, because completely translated in English that title would sound absurd but precise: The Royal Hungarian Croatian Home Guardsman Novella. The very title once again underscores Croatian sub-colonial position in the Monarchy. It is interesting to point out that the novella was first published as a book with its title in Hungarian: Magyar kirly honvd novela (Zagreb, 1921). 14 A term that belongs to Ljubomir Mici and Branko V. Poljanski, artists and writers, members of the Avant-Garde group ZENIT, with its centers in Belgrade and Zagreb. Between the two World Wars, the Zenithists believed in the power of Slavic barbarogenius, in its constructive ecumenical tradition, seen as a constitutive part of European cultural identity. 15 Gdje je ono modro praskozorje, kad sam sa klisure nad morem prvi puta ugledao Jug?... Kad sam doveo zdravo, herojsko pleme u ovu slavnu Zemlju? Kad su bijeli reci zapjevali himnu Suncu, i kad je narod pod lipama slavio sunanog boga? (415). Where is now that azure dawn in which I saw the South for the first time, standing on the cliff? Where is that dawn in which I brought this healthy and heroic tribe into this famous Land? When white prophets sang hymns to the Sun, and the people, sitting beneath lime-trees, celebrated the god of the sun (415). 16 Pan was very important motif for Krleas early poetry. In fact, Pan was the title of his first published longer poem, Pan, (Zagreb: Naklada pieva 1917). 17 The name of the utopian land is a Croatian appropriation of German Schlaraffenland. It is the same classical utopia Cloud-Cuckoo-Land of Aristophanes The Birds. 18 First published in the periodical Savremenik 3 (1918): 8. The same year, it appeared in the book Pjesme I, Poems I (Zagreb). In its final version, it was published in the book Poezija (Zagreb: Zora, 1969). This analysis uses this final version of the poem. 19 Matija Gubec, real name Ambroz Gubec. Ambroz was renamed Matija in 1622 in the literary testimonies about his heroic life. According to the legend (which up to the 1980s was considered historical fact), Matija Gubec was the leader of

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the famous 1573 peasant uprising in the region of Croatian Zagorje. He fought against the brutal ruler and representative of the Hungarian Crown, Franjo Tahi and because of his heroic deeds was proclaimed The Peasant King. After the Battle of Stubica (February 9, 1573), he was captured by Tahis soldiers, taken to Zagreb, tortured and publicly quartered (February 15, 1573). In literature, he symbolizes the Croatian spirit of resistance. Krlea used him as a metaphor of resistance in various works. Matija Gubecs presence was most pronounced in Balade Petrice Kerempuha; The Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh, first published in Zagreb (1936). According to the historian Nada Klai, Gubec was simply a peasant who lived long after his official February execution in Zagreb. Although she found documents to evident her hypothesis, Gubecs legacy remained very strong among the Croatians. 20 Increasing the sense of the historic irony, von Fredericks is a Baltic German, not a Russian, another foreign body in a senseless multinational slaughterhouse. 21 For more on Kraus, see Miroslav Krlea, Karl Kraus o ratnim stvarima, Hrvatska Revija 11 (1929): 18-26. and Miroslav Krlea, Eppur si muove, (Zagreb: 1938). Perhaps the best example of Kraus influence on Krleas style is his book Moj obraun s njima (Zagreb: Zora, 1932). In his essay Karl Kraus o ratnim stvarima, Krlea leaves an impression that this is an excerpt from a larger study of Kraus; however, he never completed the announced essay. This was not the first time that Krlea announced a longer essay on an author and never finished it. The same happened in the case of his advertised and never-completed study of Friederich Nietzsche. 22 For example, his novel Banket u Blitvi (A Banquet in Blitva), whose first volume was published in 1938, in Zagreb (DMK BNP), takes place in the anti-utopian land of Blitva, a fictitious landscape which resembles Musils Kakania from his novel A Man Without Qualities. The novel, in three volumes written between 1935 and 1964, was inspired by the Italian invasion in Ethiopia, Spanish Civil War, and the Munich Revolution (1935-39). In spite of its international ideological frame, the novel has strong allusions to Yugoslav Royalist conditions. Among other turbulent changes in Europe, the outbreak of World War II was probably the most serious obstacle for the author in articulating his prose in its final and definite form, since its central theme was understanding and denouncing the nature of totalitarianisms. Due to Krleas constnantly changing outlook on the problem, it was hard for him to find a firm focal point to analyze the assigned problematics. Although World War II may have played a crucial role in interrupting the completion of the novel, other events in modern history further confused Krleas treatment of totalitarianism. Among other unpleasant historic episodes, the post-Stalinist revival of dictatorships in Eastern and Central Europe played an important role. The situation in the West was also troublesome (Salazars dictatorship in Portugal). Aside from global movements, Krlea may have had a more personal reason to be more cautious in defining dictatorship, because he

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himself, in the early 1960s came very close to coming to power in Yugoslavia. Tito, who always had a weakness for famous intellectuals and tried to convert them to his ideology, invited Krlea for a cruise to Egypt and Sudan. Titos invitations were not subject to refusal. By joining him, Krlea took part in the Yugoslav Socialist-Comunist spectacle and came very close to power, perhaps too close for an intellectual who wanted to preserve his independence. All these experiences made Krleas reconsider his early ideas of totalitarianism from the 1930s and slowed down the process of defining the novels fictional space. 23 For instance, his widely-recognized novel, Povratak Filipa Latinovicza (Zagreb: Minerva, 1932) (The Return of Filip Latinovicz (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1995) was mainly set in Zagreb, while his most ambitious novel Zastave (Zagreb: Zora, 1967) (The Banners) has scenes set in every Central European metropolis. 24 For example, in his novella Hodorlahomor Veliki (Hodorlahomor the Great) the main character, Pero Orli escapes from Paris back to Croatia; in another narrative Vraji otok, (Devils Island) Miss Sorge attempts a suicide in Paris; and in his short story Cvrak pod vodopadom (Cricket Beneath the Waterfall), the main characters nightmares take place in Paris. 25 Predrag Matvejevi, Stari i novi razgovori s Krelom (Zagreb: Spektar, 1982). 26 Miroslav Krlea, Cvrak pod vodopadom, Novele (Zagreb: DMK BNP, 1937). 27 Some of Krleas critics (like Mirjana Stani) relate the anti-aesthetics in his novella to the broader European movement that aestheticized ugly and dark side of daily life, and traces it to 1922, the year of publication of Joyces Ulysses. They also find the employment of motifs such as a toilet to be an innovation for Croatian literature in the 1930s. This is nonsense, because other authors in Croatian literature, such as Janko Poli Kamov (d. 1910) wrote a variety of narratives based on such anti-aesthetic motifs. Aside from Kamov, other representatives of a different kind of modernism in Croatia include: Mijo Radoevi, Josip Barievi, Janko Leskovar, Milan Begovi, and others. Kamov himself introduced narratives whose style and imagery strongly announce those of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Henry Michaux, and Fernando Pessoa. He uses the aesthetics usually ascribed to the aforementioned authors at least a decade and a half before they wrote their naratives. 28 The Cricket Beneath the Waterfall has been translated into English by Branko Lenski (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1972). I quote from his translation. 29 Most probably the best account on the combination of a physical and a mental exile available to the English reading audience is Krleas novel The Return of Filip Latinovicz, (Northwestern University Press 1995). 30 See: Miroslav Krlea: Deset krvavih godina (Zagreb: Zora, 1971) 572-574. 31 Miroslav Krlea, Andr Gide o Kongu, Hrvatska Revija 9 (1929) 3-9. Krleas commentary on Gides essay Voyage au Congo in which Gide is deeply moved and horrified by the abuse of human rights in Africa.

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Romantic patriots and decenterd matriots

Beyond the Nation State Because of the East, the West cannot be sufficient unto itself; because of the West, the East cannot be sufficient unto itself-even if the men who run the military blocks would like to believe than the other side doesnt exist and doesnt need to be bothered with, except for arming against it. East and West are most obliged to take notice of each other in that part of the world where they touch each other-where, I fear, we will all disappear from the face of the earth together if the great world powers should ever pass over us. If we fail to link Central Europe together, our cities (like ourselves) will become even grayer than they are now. When people have no utopia they grow ugly and stupid... Here we live, several nations alongside one another, separate but not helpless. The Central European idea can be considered a perverse fantasy, but its singularity lies in the fact that many Central Europeans need a horizon of that kind, so much broader than that of the national state. Without it every great city of ours will be the last stop, a secondary town on the frontier-indeed a front-line town. If we lack a strategy, we will be superfluous men and women, and victims... The romantic patriots of the nineteenth century found in the national state the limit of their dream-something standing alone, like a cliff above the stormy sea. We could
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be a little more like matriots. Central Europe is rather a maternal thing. (George Konrad. Is the Dream Still Alive? Cross Currents 5 [1985]: 120-121). It is too early to tell what will happen to Central Europe in the regions ongoing process of decolonization and reevaluation of its historical location as a liminal space. In a context of ethnic and cultural diversity that can hope for new avenues for emancipation and self-realization by linking its postcommunist, postmodern and postcolonial conditions, one must re-examine those epochal signifiers in order to place Central Europe on a new map of the post-Cold War world. Postmodernism, as a condition as well as an intellectual concept, opposes foundationalism, essentialism and absolute philosophical realisms of any sort; however, the postmodernism that interests us in rethinking Central Europe is broader than the one usually recognizes in literary history as a reaction to serious high-culture discourse of modernism. This broader postmodernism for which I have been arguing here is particularly suitable for critics and historians to redefine the postcolonial cultural status of contemporary Central Europe -- a region historically defined through colonizing empires official grand narratives that have legitimized their control. This Central European postmodernism, as reflected in the literature of Claudio Magris and Miroslav Krlea, is an open strategy for identity-construction based on the rejection of any knowledge that claims to be the only accurate representation of reality. Liberated from traditional aesthetic, epistemological and ethical canons which claim objectivity on the basis of their representation, such postmodernism rejects more traditional historical representations of complete, unique and closed worlds narrated from above and engraved onto reality through infinite sets of master narrativesbe they science, realism, or modernism itself. Instead of speaking in monolithic voices, the postmodernism approach to narrative that I have claimed for Central European authors introduces a multivocity of personal textual testimonies to the powerless historical reality of its region. Moreover, as represented in works from Kafka through Magris, this postmodern aes242

thetics advocates that such multiple testimonies offer their readers the only chance they have for regaining their lost subjectivities (the unwritten histories of the region) and rewriting history. In order to recoup historical losses and to reintroduce Central Europe onto the geopolitical map of todays literary and cultural history, theorists and writers alike must connect the post in postmodern with the post in postcolonial in ways that the authors at the Lisbon conference could not. In so doing, they would recognize how this strategy suits both the writing of fiction and that of national identity, engaging readers in a productive dynamics, in the epochal process of recapturing the plural realities of a historically-misrepresented region. If, as Lyotard would have agreed, the postmodern condition opens the possibility of putting an end to older authorities metanarratives of legitimation, then the post in postmodern and post in postcolonial are historical companions because they share that particular quality, the ability to question and refocalize older hierarchies in their rewritings of various historical narratives. The historical problem and the narrative approach to a solution which I have characterized as the natural postmodern condition of Central Europe are not a creation of late twentieth-century crises in subjectivity. Franz Kafka, a modernist in his rejection of master naratives, whenever he underscores his desire to reclaim a subjectposition in history, he always demonstrates his understanding of the Central Europes natural postmodern condition. It becomes especially clear in his letters to Milena (1920). He saw that the history of his world, due to its colonial context, did not correspond with the dominant Wests traditional notions of historical linearity. Todays critics must agree, since the linearity of that dominant history would force them to locate modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, while postmodernism would be placed at its sixties -a formulation of aesthetic history from the dominant Western point of view, encompassing Proust and Joyce, but not the authors discussed here. From the perspective of Kafkas view of history (from the history of minor cultures), the connection between modernism and postmodernism must be seen slightly differently in his time and
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ours. As far as the literature of contemporary Central Europe is concerned, it is easy to claim that modernism and postmodernism emerged simultaneously at the beginning of this century, as movements advocating two different treatments of reality in narrative. In the context proposed here, juxtaposing the dominant power blocks of Eastern and Western Europe with Central Europe representing the instability in between, modernism would more properly be associated with the dominant and politically-stable West which appears within the region as a colonizer, as Kafka well knew early in the century. Postmodernism, in contrast, is the aesthetic representation of a world and a world-history seen through the gaze of non-dominant West, the one that Milan Kundera recognizes as a marginalized West both self-colonized and colonized from East. As such, a postmodern narrative emerges as particularly able to represent the politically unstable condition of a region undergoing a process of decolonization and of the individual subjects whose daily experiences contradict the master narratives of the colonizers. Like the Eastern European intellectuals discussed in the introduction, Central European subjects (authors, historians) undergoing decolonization, as they pass into a postcolonial status within the West and into postmodern resistance to the Easts and Wests preferred histories, are aware of the epochal loss of the master narratives. At the same time, however, these Central European voices are seizing their own language of de-legitimation within traditional reality constructs, to stress the polyphony and polyperspectiveness within a region that has been represented monolithically. It is not the case that there has been no aesthetic development within the region.; in fact, a fundamental difference emerges between Kafka and Kundera in locating Central Europe, one that confirms the existence of a tradition of another sort: where Kafka saw the beginning of an independent, postcolonial phase in Central European history, Kundera sees its end. Yet in his anachronistic nostalgia, Kundera can still believe that, after 1968, after the definite cultural colonization of his essentially western country by the Eastern Block, Central Europe was dead. He believes that, when the Russian tanks arrived, all tolerance, methodical doubt, plurality
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of thought, and personal art -- in short, everything that has characterized the West since the Renaissance -- had disappeared, leaving nothing but a historical abyss and epochal silence. In accepting this concept of history, it seems that, even now, Kunderas nostalgia still simply wants to replace one totalitarian concept for another. Kundera wants Western metaphysics of presence to take the place of Russian-Slavic militant hypersensitivity, which, he feels, has elevated emotions to the level of rationality and thus has justified the conquest of the region by representing it not as a colonization, but as a manifestation of brotherly care and love. Although he is very suggestive in his critique of both the East and West, Kundera does not see any possibility of overcoming the crisis in the regions history. In contrast, as a member of the underrepresented group of Central European Jewry, Kafka was already able to sense in the early decades of the century what Vaclav Havel, after the Russian invasion, called the power of the powerless. He calls for new histories, for new personal narratives of de-legitimation which will only be possible if he can make the connection between the post in postmodern and post in postcolonial in Central Europe -- the connection that ex-Soviet molded Eastern European intellectuals still have to make. In this sense Kafkas post, in his postmodern, decentered narrative technique, does not come after Kunderas lost past. Instead, like Homi Bhabhas concept of the beyond, Kafka is postmodern because he speaks from beyond, transcending the given monolithic reality by interjecting immanent testimonies to realities of experience that still need to be written or rewritten into the history of a region which he does not control. One of the first attempts in transcending such a reality was the deontic performance of the Good Soldier Svejk. He was on his way to rewriting Habsburg history by reproducing its claustrophobic and totalitarian reality ad-absurdum and thus undermining its political foundations. Although postmodern in his mimetic gestures, Svejk ultimately could not transcend the boundaries of colonial modernity imposed on him (its technologies of citizenship), because the institutions that governed his life were flexible enough to accommodate his dumb show. Even though he did not rewrite the obligato245

ry narratives of official history through his sense of absurdity, Svejk nonetheless enabled his readers to make a step beyond the limits of the world they shared and embrace the possibilities of an era of global decolonization. And even though the resonances of that decolonization absurdly were withheld from Central Europe, thus keeping it, psychologically, as well as politically, a colonial hostage perhaps longer than any other dominant colony. At the same time, then, Svejks literary performance uncovered the two faces of Central Europe, its colonized margins and the colonizing center. His escapades have definitively circumscribed Central Europes reality as a hinter-national culture of different underrepresented peoples whose ghostly manifestations appear daily in most common forms of individual and collective survival. His mimetic system of avoidance nonetheless embraces the quotidian nature of Central Europes soul which, among people like Svejk, is taken for granted or sensed instead of being discussed or analyzed. Svejks Central Europe is colonized from above, but from within the sphere of his gestures; that Central Europe appears as a real and spiritual landscape and includes Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, and any Habsburg-like urban entity in which the power centers of a remote empire were installed. Svejks seemingly natural acceptance of the regions trans-national reality also suggests another face of Central Europe, one at which he only hints but which he is not able to pursue because of his position within the still-colonized margins of the empire. That Central Europe is contained intuitively in his adventures and in his attitudes of absolute acceptance, it is the dependent part of Europe, whose identity is based on the West or the East, as well as on the undefined center whose future is seen as integral to the old continent. In spite of its strategic limitations, it is by using the Svejkian legacy that Magris is able to multiply his voice and to replace the grand narratives of legitimation with his visions of local narratives of de-legitimation. By assuming a perspective like Svejks consciously, Magris links historic regionalism with a new sense of postmodern cosmopolitanism whose perspectives are utterly important in redefinitions of Central Europes existence. Since, as an Ita246

lian intellectual removed from the margins of Central Europe, he never belonged to the colonized west of Kundera (or, again, to the colonized South of Miroslav Krlea), Magris can use his individual eclecticism to propose a narrative scheme that sponsors a readers set of searches for a genuine and plural identity in the region whose historical identities were constructed by external Others. In such a context, where no individual within Central Europe has a public sphere needed for reconstructing identities, Krlea could definitively be seen as a public disturbance, as an intellectual whose narratives did not leave Central European, Croatian, or ex-Yugoslavian hegemony at ease. However, due to his own colonized position and as a dominant figure in a non-dominant milieu, he could not make the necessary step beyond his own reality to redefine himself and the regions histories. Instead of redefining his reality by using the (precisely recognized) apparatus of his own colonized reality, Krlea ends by perpetuating its consequences demonstrating how the production of Others goes beyond the realm of master narratives imposed by colonizers and dangerously survives in everyday life as an oppressive chain reaction historically known as divide and rule. In his Danubio, Claudio Magris shows how a postmodern rejection of historical exclusivity corresponds with a postcolonial rewriting of history by means of more regional narratives of authenticity. His travelogue is thus a tribute to Kafkas past that needs to be rewritten, and its existence proves the continued validity of Kafkas prophetic words, which in the early 1920s were no more than a lament and a manifestation of a frantic need for self-recognition, uttered by one of those powerful powerless individuals who were systematically and repeatedly swept away from the scenes of the official history. The words of Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose contribution to a search for different meanings of post are one of the bases for my analysis: Postmodern culture is the culture in which all of the postmodernisms operate, sometimes in synergy, sometimes in competition. And because contemporary culture is, in
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certain senses to which I shall return, transnational, postmodern culture is global -- though that does not by any means mean that it is the culture of every person in the world. (In My Fathers House 144) Suspicious toward a universal linking of the posts in postmodern and postcolonial, Appiah suggests trans-nationality as a global regional phenomena. In order for any regions world view to become cosmopolitan, in terms of having any claim to legitimacy beyond the narrowest of spheres, he believes that it ought to be based on individuals regional feelings and on ones comprehension of the immediate environment. In his rejection of universal history, Appiah thinks of African colonial specificities, calling for yet another postmodern gesturefor a postcolonial space-clearing which will allow new voices to be heard, voices of those historically represented through silence, while misrepresented through official colonial narratives of legitimation. The colonial realities of Africa are predominantly modernist in the perspective of postcolonial intellectuals like Appiah, and their narratives of regional liberation are constructed around the image of a more monolithic, colonizing West. Yet the Central European situation, while itself colonial, must also acknowledge that the West is as plural as is the East, and as the colonized themselves are within their region. Two global regions marginalized by the mighty exist in different colonial realities and experience different regional dynamics of colonization (centrifugal, moving outward to Africa and Asia, versus centripetal, inward-directed within Central Europe). In consequence, the link of the posts in postmodern and postcolonial that I have argued for the current epoch, may feel more natural of intellectuals within Central Europe than it does to Appiah. Constantly deprived of their tribal memories as spaces outside colonization, the discussed Central European writers (like their fictional heroes) had no historical chance do develop a positive and optimal modernist national(ist) narrative such as Achebes Things Fall Apart. Not having a native history to define themselves against the Western Others, some of the most marginalized Central Euro248

peans, Krleas Croatians, must operate with utopian narratives that offer them no optimal projection into a future and no seemingly authentic, nostalgic memories of their collective past. Instead, as is the case with Krleas domobrans, these individuals have to project their non-existent (non-represented) historical selves onto disembodied images at the margins of the dominant culture. They are forced to reproduce their images of selfhood by reference to the staples of Western existence, exemplified in a graphic image of dried hams hanging like flags in urban food stores. The link of postmodernity and postcolonialism in Central Europe which intellectuals like Magris now propose, and that can be traced back as far as Kafka and Krlea, offer the region its only option to make a productive reality of its own, its only solid promise of a possibility of rewriting the official history and replacing it with long-awaited individual narratives whose contents will challenge the discourses of the colonial powers. This Western postcolonial postmodernism, the one which does not have recourse to a history of an Other outside the West, questions those narratives which have been the only ones operative in the regions, but which have let its inhabitants down personally and historically. In bracketing his notions about different meanings of post, Appiah clarified his sense of postmodern transnationality by noting how: postmodern culture is global-though that does not by any means mean that it is the culture of every person in the world (144). In his postmodern treatment of Central Europe, Claudio Magris came to a similar conclusion operating with the ideas of local and global. He even goes so far as to question the very idea of Central Europe by saying that the idea of Central Europe is the biggest danger for that same Central European culture,1 because one should not constantly be talking about himself or herself and the world in this way, thus thematizing either its existence or its absence. For Magris, to live the authentic experience of Central Europe, one of the most important things is to be able to forget ones own self as traditionally defined. Yet such a suggestion also begs another question: how can a contemporary intellectual expect that people whose minds have his249

torically been colonized agree to yet another silence? Magris answer again links up with Appiahs postmodern idea of global regionalism, and sounds almost too simple to be true. The ability to forget, according to Magris, should not be taken literally, but needs to happen to restructure peoples concepts of their communities. He sees neither essential difference between centers and provinces nor does he divide them by rules of geography, geostrategy, and geopolitics. He thus calls for redefinition of cosmopolitanism, a redefinition according to which the basic criterion for being in an imagined center is contained within the way an individual lives his or her cultural dimension. For Magris, to be in a center thus does not mean to reside in a certain dominant geographic place, but to be present and active when confronted with a certain cultural and political problem -- to be at the center of ones own world and world view. Instead of rebuilding the nostalgic worlds of yesterday in Central Europe as its intellectuals (Zweig, Kundera, Schwarz) have been wont to do, by constantly lamenting its uniqueness and celebrating its rich cultural borders and thus creating yet another provincial stereotype, Magris believes that one has to open himself or herself to the world and its narratives: one must be simultaneously aware of the most private and intimate problems of the immediate neighborhood, as well as staying alert to the global situation. The time we live in calls for a new, temporal, and epochal notion of global citizenship, instead of the geographical and territorial ideas of national and personal identity which have been at play on the nationalist maps of East, West, and Central Europe. The transnational postmodern model of a postcolonial Central Europe is global in its structure, evident in its narrative horizon of geopolitics and local in its diversity of geopolitical and individual subjectivities. In the unclear geopolitical reality of Central Europe at the end of the millennium, the reality that confounded contemporary Eastern European intellectuals. Such redefinition of identities subverts the historical plurality of nation states in the region whose reality has typically been constructed in essentialist terms. Such essentialism, he realizes, is another great danger for the historical fu250

ture of a region whose identity search has to this point been based on a badly-defined quest for authenticity, a militant and exclusivistic enterprise in which each and every ethnic group can suddenly appear as the Other in relation with neighboring groups. A possible narrative subversion of official history, truly is po-et(h)ical, and, as such, of utter importance for Central Europe of tomorrow. It is crucial not only because it speaks from the trans-national beyond of the present geopolitical map of historical identities and thus undermines authority of colonial histories of the region, but also because it promotes Central European culture as a coherent public sphere. Such public sphere should be as controlled by a web of the regions inhabitants narratives of various origins. This study thus proposes a much-needed substitution, in which that kind of cultural sphere would replace modernist national and ethnic concepts of divided nation-states still prevalent today. The future world of Central Europe is necessarily de-essentialized, and it requires the kind of connection between the post in the postmodern and the post in the postcolonial conditions of the regions. That connection represents a kind of historical space-clearing gesture, which is possible in Central Europe precisely because of its multiple historical and personal identities -- a multiplicity not reducible to a simple colonized/colonizer dichotomy. Such a space-clearing gesture may become possible once Central Europe is decolonized, its history rewritten, and its time regained in Kafkas sense, through the numerous new individual narratives of authenticity written by thinkers such as Magris, Konrad, and Havel. After a public sphere of Central European culture is recognized in political and cultural history and reinforced against the national(ist) criteria the dynamics of which still make the reality of the region, words such as Konrads matriotism could be understood and used in newly-emerging regional and global strategies of cultural and individual self-definition. The plural Central Europe appears as a female entity in relation with the again culturally plural, but still-dominant West. The ideology and global politics of that West have been played out heretofore in a monolithic way based upon Enlightenment capital-R Reason
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(Appiah), where female means multivocal, non-dominant, powerful in its powerlessness, tolerant, not engendered in traditional terms, but open to the future in a trans-national Post- European culture in which only decolonized and de-centered, nomadic minds can sense and think various regional and global dynamics. Maybe, after all, we should agree with being a little more like Konrads matriots in terms of transcending the realities of a divided cultural world in which patriotism excludes plural existences and promotes exclusivity instead of polymorphy, a strategy and sensibility which has always been so essential for the future of Central Europe in the many moments when its history and the narratives of its inhabitants lives needed to be rewritten. In so doing, we may remap the cultural and historical narratives of Europe. A new map should include not only Central Europe as the space between the more traditional imperial and superpower blocs, but also the peoples from the margins whose Otherness has been relied on to define the region, but whose voices have too often been silenced and whose gestures misconstrued.

For more, see Nikola Petkovi, Srednja Evropa kao metafora protesta, Danas (Dec. 1988): 10-13. (Central Europe as a Metaphor of Protest, an interview with Claudio Magris).

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